A very old argument. The counter is: the audience for videogames has massively expanded. The secondary counter is: $70 is merely the entry point into games. Even before you look at microtransactions, you have battle passes, dozens of deluxe versions, and season passes.
If this was really an issue - game prices not keeping up with inflation - publishers wouldn't be posting profits (not revenue, profits) in the billions of dollars.
And on a more explicit point: God of War, a game with no microtransactions or any other BS, made their company over $500M in revenue in a year, for a game that cost them under $100M to make.
So while I'm not surprised these multi-billion-dollars-of-profit companies are so ready to squeeze as much money as they can out of us, I don't attribute it to Tiny Tim begging for enough money to live, but to Ebenezer Scrooge hording as much money as he possibly can, no matter the societal cost (or cost to himself).
You're taking the most succesful game on the most successful platform as an example, not sure it's very relevant for the thousands of games that get released every year...
And yet it's not the thousands of games that are released each year that include extra advertising, but the the largest and often most successful ones, because they know they can get away with it, and they're the ones with a built in audience to sell to advertisers.
Not every game is going to find success. We could do with a lot less of the major publishers ideas of "pay us $80 after the battle pass for the same shit you've been playing for 4 years with a new paint job".
If an independent company like New Blood can find success simply by making good games and being a good company then major publishers can follow suit or die off.
If this was really an issue - game prices not keeping up with inflation - publishers wouldn't be posting profits (not revenue, profits) in the billions of dollars.
And on a more explicit point: God of War, a game with no microtransactions or any other BS, made their company over $500M in revenue in a year, for a game that cost them under $100M to make.
So while I'm not surprised these multi-billion-dollars-of-profit companies are so ready to squeeze as much money as they can out of us, I don't attribute it to Tiny Tim begging for enough money to live, but to Ebenezer Scrooge hording as much money as he possibly can, no matter the societal cost (or cost to himself).