It's also, even now with a dozen different streaming services, cheaper to stay subscribed to everything than it used to be to buy media. I have a gigantic DVD collection I spent way too much money and time on that's basically just room decor at this point. I can watch all that stuff and so much more at much better than DVD quality without even getting off my couch these days.
While games are currently being stubborn with pricing, I think that's where we're eventually going to end up too. Right now the people who buy games seem to mainly be the middle aged people who grew up buying games. Kids/young adults seem to almost exclusively play free to play and mobile games. I'm sure part of that is because as a kid you don't have much money, I would have been all over FTP games had they existed in the 80s/90s, but part of it is they just think about things differently, they are growing up with smartphones and tablets in their hands.
I can see those kids moving to subscription services as they get older, they are already use to that for music and video, and the monthly nature makes them seem cheaper, or at least more accessible to someone with a tight budget. Based on what I have seen, trying to convert them to $70, $80, or whatever game prices are eventually pushed up to is going to be an incredibly hard sell, when they could just go back to Minecraft or Fortnite, or pay for GamePass and get a huge chunk of curated games. I'm pretty sure that's why MS is shifting so hard to GamePass, and why Epic is coming at it from the other end making Fortnite into a game platform. Neither of them are worried about us, our generation has proven that we'll pay for anything at damn near any price, they are thinking about what things are going to look like in 2030 and 2040 when their core market is people who are kids now.
