I kind of agree. If you can't profit , than thats the dev/publishers fault like you say. 

Give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Why is it the biggest, most successful publishers pleading poverty and saying they have to pull all this shit to turn a profit? No one forced game budgets to become astronomical. If it's really too difficult to recoup such an exorbitant investment then scale your budget down. Letting the WB's and Activisions of the world charge more for the base game won't stop them from having microtransactions and season passes, it'll just be one more surcharge they exploit.

My buddy has worked with AAA games at R* and tells me they actually can sell games at $40 and be fine. People forget the price was raised not because of development costs but on a test to see if people would pay more. Madden 05 Steelbook and Halo 2 Steelbook. Both sold very well and after that everyone followed. Micro Transactions and a crapload of DLC isn't due to development costs. It's just finding more ways to get more money out of you. Developers also can create mostly what we see now on a smaller budget with a smaller team and just take longer. AAA devs like to get too many cooks in the kitchen and shorten dev time.  No, the price should actually be lowered and AAA devs manage things better and not be cunts about DLC.

Very much this

But I hate the consequence, which is all the DLC and microtransaction shenanigans to maximise their profits

They're free to try, but the proper solution would be to find ways to make development processes more efficient. I imagine it's hard, but there's only so much money you can get from consumers. There's probably still room for increasing prices, but it's not a sound plan in the long term.

Hell no. The market right now is very welcoming to pretty much all genre and ideas so literally all you have to do is make a good game and market it adequately and it will sell.

I expect next gen games will be $70. Games have been $60 for way longer than any of us should have been expecting.

Fuck no. Huge games like Skyrim and Horizon that take years to develop with a lot of money put into them are profitable at $60, then each yearly cod or destiny with minimal improvements should sure as hell be profitable at $60. I'm fine with cosmetic micro transactions, but when they start effecting gameplay (making grinds very long to incline you to buy them, paying for better weapons, stuff that gives the person who bought the microtransactions advantage in the gameplay, etc) I call bullshit.

Inflation does not matter. What matters is sticker shock. This is why games haven't risen since the 80's... because we have a perception of what a game should cost. If they started charging $80.00 per game, a lot of people would quit buying them.

The only solution is to start making cheaper games if they can't make the money they want to make. Nintendo does a good job of this so it's possible.

This is when Canadian prices were waaayyyy out of whack, but I paid $137 ( with sales tax ) for Phantasy Star 2 on the Genesis in 1989. We've had some crazy fluctuations up here.