Hmm. I think it's just as easy to find products that haven't gotten worse or more expensive as it is to find ones that have. For every mars bar, there's a video game.
A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)
Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.
They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
As I said to another commenter, that applies to many of the games I buy today. OK, not quite all since I do buy some titles digitally, but that is my choice.
> They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
And are much better in terms of accessibility, quality-of-life in general, scope, etc.
But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.
Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)
20 years ago you bought a disk and the entire game was on there. 10 years ago you bought a disk and you have a massive day 1 patch to get the rest of the game. Today you buy a physical box with no actual disk in it, only a download code!
I'm exaggerating a little bit about today's situation but not by much...
I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.
That describes at least 90% of the games I play today.
I should have gone with any electrical item, tbh; that would probably have flown here without any dissent. But video games that are nowadays almost always one or two orders of magnitude 'better value' while being approximately half the price they were back in the nineties are still a legitimate example, I think.
While this is _true_, it's hardly a good-faith interpretation. The original Mario Bros was around $40 on release. Mostly sold as a bundle with the NES itself around $100.
That's $350 in today's money. Oddly around the same as the switch 1 on release ($299) + BOTW ($60)
Compare the "value" of NES + Mario Bros with Switch 1 + Breath of the Wild.
Yes Nintendo can take one of those away from you, that's despicable, but the "product" has shrunk in no way.
The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.
That's a better example, though the "continually better, faster & cheaper" days for computers (and consumer electronics broadly) have recently been heavily disrupted by the current AI rush. Guess we'll find out how temporary or permanent this is.
What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?
How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?
Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?
A world that contains Breath of the Wild, Blue Prince, Balatro, Mario Kart World, (you get the point—there are lots of good games).