Seph Sterling has directly addressed this in the past. Inflation has no connection to minimum wage, or wages in general. Trickle down only happens if there’s something forcing business owners to give that money to workers. Also, they aren’t actually selling $60 games. They’re selling $60 games with a bunch of gambling mechanics attached that tend to extract money from certain neurodivergant people, such as those who escaped gambling addiction and got into video games to help control it.

I would add that there have been times when the industry has reduced its cost, but that cost was never passed on to customers. The cartridge to CD transition, for example. That was likely in the neighborhood of a $20 reduction in cost, but games did not come down in price. They pocketed that money.

(The transition from CD to downloadable games did have a drop as well, though it’s not as much as you might think.)

Software is also a business where you either pay millions of dollars for one copy, or we all pay a few dollars for millions of copies. Games generally pick the volume side of that choice. For most of the time period since the 90s, games were still growing in volume, and the increase in costs could be covered by an increase in volume. The inflation during much of that time period was irrelevant because of this. You can’t just pick an arbitrary date in the 90s and calculate inflation since then.

That said, at this point, video games have likely found the size of the market they are likely to find. On that basis, I would concede there is a place for costs to rise with inflation from here on out. But I would also say that we don’t need video games to be these giant, expensive open worlds with mediocre game play. While I haven’t sworn off AAA entirely (I’m currently finishing up my first run through of Cyberpunk 2077), tight indie games have been the bulk of my enjoyment for a long time now.