Retro gaming is rising in popularity for good reasons. And it's not purely nostalgia.

A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)

Video games are honestly a pretty bad example. 10-20 years ago, you'd buy your video game, and it was a complete item, that you owned and could play for as long as you didn't damage it. Once you were done with it, you could lend it to friends, or sell it and recoup a decent chunk of money for the next game you wanted.

Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.

They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.

TV's for one, have become insanely cheap. You can get 4k TVs for like, nothing, especially after inflation adjustments from the 2010s. Bigger panels, brighter screens, too bad we started shoving stupid and annoying OSes and Ads in them.

I think the implication is specifically for physical products. Video games aren't standardized sizes or materials and you don't somehow download 20% less content today than you did downloading the same game 5 or 10 years ago. (Ignoring some obvious outliers like games/content pulled due to licensing expirations - which are really stupid.)

Subjectively, video games did get both worse and more expensive over the last 20 years.

But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.

Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends. You had a physical copy and never had to renew a subscription, watch ads, or pay anything extra to unlock content. Most games didn't even have a separate launcher. Just run it and play. Updates, when they existed, were small. And no lootboxes, no gambling. They had hidden maps or levels, so it actually was fun to play the same game repeatedly.

I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.

show me a modern video game that is better than Myst or Riven (in the same genre)

I even prefer the original CS over most of today's FPS games.

What alternate reality are you living in where the video games industry isn't a charred husk of what it was, just over a decade and a half ago?

What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?

How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?

Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?

> For every mars bar, there's a video game.

The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.