First of all, you and I generally agree, but there's circumstance I don't often see mentioned. It's shitty, and I'm not defending that part of MT NBA 2K21, but the MTX is just essentially in 2 game modes, MyPlayer and MyTeam. If you merely want a basketball sim to play against friends or on the internet, there are basically no microtransactions, also I haven't seen one unskippable ad. Depends how you play NBA 2K I figure. I enjoy the basketball sim, it's well done and really sensible. And you actually succeed more like it is supposed to be played, should you play the game which is rare for a sports game. So depends what you want. I wouldn't blame anyone for being flipped off NBA 2K cause of microtransactions. But only as a basketball sim it is really great.

Game prices have changed regardless of inflation. We now get much larger, longer, fully games for cheaper than we ever used to. And the tools are better, pricing and the marketing more elegant, and the sector is bigger. It costs about zero pennies to market an electronic game, and just dollars to manufacture and market a disk, so video games are only a fixed price model. Meaning that each purchase, no matter for how little cash, increases their profitability. IP generally tends to be similar to this, as opposed to state a Ferrari, that has individual component and labour costs to build.

In any case, games are monetized to back and hell. Some games market for $60 all in, but innumerable games have deluxe editions, pre-order editions, season passes, battle passes, boosts, etc, etc.. The sport game sub-segment is also greatly siphoned by being a yearly series with typically very unambitious varies from year to year. They are floating this as a trial balloon because they could.

Yeah, this thread is amusing, especially when I am pretty certain the age demographic is slightly higher than other gambling subreddits. Games have been $50-60 because I was purchasing them with allowance in 1999. You will find far more ways to acquire games cheaply than ever before, you can get access to literally hundreds (if not thousands) of games for the purchase price of a couple subscriptions right now. However, when you reside in a nation with extreme wealth disparity where many people only make enough to just get by, they blame fair costs of goods/services instead of attributing the financial system they live in where this is a problem for them.

People today pay $15-20 to go and see a 2 hour movie without batting an eyelid but $70 for possibly dozens or even hundreds of hours of entertainment is unreasonable? In the event the average game cost $100 it'd still be really good value in terms of hours of amusement per dollar. In addition to the fact that as you said Buy NBA 2K21 MT  have been $60 for well over 20 years now, we have been due a price increase for the last couple of generations.