It’s just the basic logic of maturing market. They couldn’t really increase the game prices that much more without affecting demands, nor could they improve efficiency of making games (the capital costs and team sizes have only gotten up) so they did the thing they could. Try to turn games from a product that the sell into a service they provide and can therefore lock people into their walled gardens and keep continuously charging fees and subscriptions. Too bad games are more of an art form than a news paper or a some tool maintenance contract is.

you would have to declare them as internet utilities.

many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

<Oh no this would kill live service games

One major argument for consoles is still that there is a single unified platform that gives better bang-for-buck than PC of the same price, and that studios can dev and optimize their games on more easily.

That is not how their business model works. The consoles themselves are sold almost at cost of production or at a loss. The money for Microsoft, Nintendo, Microsoft comes from those exclusives and live service subscriptions. They want to maximize the amount of their hardware in homes and then make the money on selling the thing that actually makes them useful.

They can’t. It’s too sweet of a deal when there is an already existing fanbase ready to give them their money for much less work and risk than building a totally new game.

Oo, it has a demo out already?