.......a little perspective is in order. 

When I was a kid growing up in the 80's, a gallon of gas cost seventy five cents.  A pay phone call cost a quarter.  A candy bar cost anywhere between 25 cents and 50 cents.  The first game I ever bought (and incidentally, the first shitty game I ever played) was Wrestlemania for the Nes.  It cost $50.

Fast forward to the year 2010.  A gallon of gas costs upwards of $3.  A payphone call costs......well, when was the last time you saw a payphone?  A candy bar costs about $1.  The last game I bought cost $50.  Times have changed, but despite the fact that gaming consoles do much more than just play games, games have gotten complex to the point that they are often more visually impressive than movies a few years ago, the prices are still about the same.. If you ask me, we gamers have got it pretty damned good!

Next time you pay a few dollars for your next PSN, Live Arcade, or Virtual Console game, that takes about 2 hours to beat and has primitive gameplay/graphics, remember:  these games used to cost $50!  Appreciate how good we've got it.  I know I do!

You know what!

...you got a point there

True dat' dawg. I was just at a gas station where plain unleaded was $3.83 a gallon.

I guess it's just a matter of perspective, but $50 is still a lot of money for a lot of people, even adjusted for 20 years of inflation :-p

And look at console costs!  My Nes was $189, my Snes was $199, my N64 (day one purchase) was $249, and my PS2 was $300!  There were times when consoles like the Neo Geo or the 3D0 were between $500-$700.  The cost of everything seems to have gone up while we continue to get better and better hardware/software for the same/less money.

Yeah, games don't seem to be really affected by inflation.

Weren't most NES games $30 to $40 tho?

Trust me.  I had to save for weeks to buy my first Nes game.  It was $49.  When I finally started seeing games for $19 (much older games), I couldn't believe it!  But yeah.  Nes games were $50.  Gameboy games were $30.  I even have some really old magazines that I could dig out of my closet from the late 80's and early 90's, if I have to.

*edit* Since I'm getting old, I figured I needed to google old Nes sale pages to make sure memory served me correctly.  Here's a page from a 1990 Sears catalog: http://www.huguesjohnson.com/features/sears_catalog/sears-catalog-1990-pg1446-NES_full.jpg

americans cant complain about petrol prices its  basically free there we pay 1.80 a litre thats about 7.50 a gallon thats about 5.40 us

Or you can always do the Steam sale thing!

And if you take into account things like CPI and inflation, that $50 in the 80s is like $75-100 nowadays. So we're getting even more