The price of video games seems to always be a hot button and what we have seen is more and more developers / publishers releasing DLC, Season Passes, etc.
It's a fact of the world that inflation exists. Since 2006 when video games moved to the $60 average price from $50, the price of food, gasoline, electric and just about everything else has shot through the roof. Doubled easily in many instances. Average pay rates have risen as well.
I have been playing games since 1978. In the late 70's, Atari 2600 and ColecoVision games were $50 each. Moving into the 80's, NES games were pretty much standard fare for $50. The SNES and Genesis with their larger cartridges? It was a free-for-all. Games averaged $60 for SNES titles. I remember paying (and still have the receipt somewhere) $80 at Walmart for The Illusion of Gaia.
The PlayStation and Saturn's release saw prices drop to $50 for top-tier titles because manufacturing costs for the CD-ROMs were much cheaper than ROM carts. But in the intervening years, game development costs have increased dramatically. While there are greedy publishers out there who intentionally withhold part of a game to sell as DLC, the fact that we as gamers and consumers must face is that games need to rise in price.
I'll use EA and Star Wars Battlefront as an example. Yes, I know EA are greedy a-holes but bear with me. Battlefront is a good game. It's gorgeous, it runs smoothly, etc. And EA is catching a ton of flak for the $50 season pass and IMO, rightly so. That's a hair shy of the cost of a new game!
But how many people buy the season pass? 25%? 50%? I would rather spend $80 for a game up-front, with all content included. If the game was sold for $80 rather than $60, it would be guaranteed that you would have a 100% buy-in rate for all content.
Maybe I am being an idealist or a dreamer, but I would rather spend the money up-front for all the content on the disc rather than piecemeal for DLC. Publishers/Developers would be making more money from each game sale and not have to gamble on DLC and what percentage of people who own their game would be willing to buy that extra content.
I don't like the idea of handing over more money for a game than I already do. But looking at it realistically, we have unfair expectations that with the cost of everything in the world going up, that video games should maintain the status quo in pricing. Publishers are seeing diminishing returns and regardless of how greedy we think a company is, they exist for the purpose of making money pure & simple.
Publishers like EA, Activision, Square-Enix, etc. need to have an open & honest dialog with retailers, gamers and the media. Costs are going up and prices will have to rise as well.