I have to disagree with you on the pricing point. Just because people “understand” that pricing for games has been behind other entertainment doesn’t mean they are willing to stomach that increase. Most people buy video games as an impulse buy from their discretionary funds after bills have been paid. At the price point they are at currently it has stopped being impulse buys. This has led to so.many of the AAA failures of the past two console gens(current and last). When a brand new game costs $60(and gaining) and a weeks worth of groceries cost $100 you don’t think in terms of “will this game be fun” but instead "will this game be worth a weeks worth of groceries. And while this isn’t a problem for indies who are currently eating the lunch of the AAA pubs right in front of their faces, it will crater those legacy studios.
No one with sense is saying that they wouldn’t want to increase prices. The debate is whether or not the publishers who are pushing for higher cost of games realize that the higher it goes the less sales they’re actually going to make. Because again it doesn’t matter if the consumer knows why the cost has gone up or not. It’s a matter of whether or not the cost is going to seem justifiable for the customer. And that’s the rub everyone keeps saying that oh games should cost more game should cost more. The problem with that statement is after a certain price point games are no longer going to be a hobby purchase. They’re no longer going to be that impulse buy that they’ve survived on. They’re going to be that thing where you end up waiting for it to go below $25 or for it to be a runaway smash hit that everyone is telling you is a great game. And that isn’t even to say that good games are always going to cost more money look at Balatro, look at schedule 1, look at Repo. These are games that were made on shoestring budgets that players enjoyed. The problem with ballooning costs isn’t that games are getting bank breakingly expensive to make. It’s that risk averse publishers and investors are chasing trends that players have moved on from and they no longer are made up of people who actually play games.