Wow ... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days :) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what ... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap.
The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be. Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question ... when will game publishers?