It's called AAA because that's the sound I make when I see the pricetag.

at least in the realm of video games AAA only refers to funding, not quality. in fact it's pretty consistently shit because terrible business practices almost inevitably result in late and premature releases because they have to meet arbitrary deadlines and believe they can always fix things later. to be fair the community is pretty idiotic and they consistently reward this behavior so they have nothing to lose in most cases.

A direct inflation conversion like that is not invalid, but it lacks a lot of context. Games might have been more expensive back then, but everything else was orders of magnitude cheaper. People were buying homes and starting families as young adults back then. Now many in that bracket live check-to-check and struggle to put food on the table. It stings a lot more.

also to clarify: I was using Canadian dollars. Major releases are around one hundred bucks here when adding tax, give or take a little.

Now do factor in the growth of the market and also the price to produce a physical copy and digital, the market share between physical copy, and also the bonus the CEO get each year.

So cool thing. Nobody has to care about inflation and we can all be mad and should actively boycott 70$ games so the price goes back to 60$.