I agree, personal attacks are not right. However I can't say I agree with pretty much anything you wrote up there about inflation, economics and the gaming market.
You can keep pushing the greed argument, but that has little to do with it. Forecasting, planning for the future, adjusting to fluctuations in exchange rates, production costs, wages, is what drives up prices. You can blame gamers for flocking to be best advertised, best bull shotted games. That's why graphics and marketing get priority, because it sells games. Simple as that. To stand out in the competition you need the best looking best advertised games.
And yes, more games get sold than ever before. However at an lower average price, since how else is game sales revenue not climbing at the same rate? All those extra games have their own costs. In the end costs, either due to marketing, better graphics, simply higher volume of available games/competition, keep going up, while revenues aren't keeping pace.
"a consumer may find gaming hard to enjoy when one now has to buy more hardware and/or more games to "truly enjoy it" that they simply don't have time for."
Err, so a consumer might find watching TV hard to enjoy because they can't possible watch everything to truly enjoy watching tv? That does not make sense at all. Gaming is cheaper than ever and there is so much choice nowadays it would be really hard not to be able to find something to truly enjoy.
The last month I truly enjoyed Factory Simulator on Roblox, didn't cost me a cent.
It even runs on my 15 year old Windows NT machine (I had 4 accounts going in co-op lol, can run 2 per windows device)
Very easy to truly enjoy gaming. Say bye to FOMO and just play what you enjoy playing.
