It's not a law of nature that games have to be super expensive to make, and I'm tired of it being used as an excuse to justify higher prices

Game budgets are overbloated, and if publishers wished to, they could easily cut costs to make the game development costs much, much lower.

Graphics, motion scanning, hiring A-list actors like wholesome chungus Keanu Reeves and spending a gorillion on marketing is what mainly makes it expensive. Also in some cases, scope.

Games don't HAVE to be expensive to make. It's fully a choice that developers and publishers make.

They could easily reduce the graphical fidelity a bit (we don't need to see the pores on characters), hand-made animations still have a place as seen in AA games, who cares if there's a top star celebrity in the game and skip out on paying a fortune on marketing on times square and super bowl and not every game has to be a 100 hour long open world with choices and voiced lines everywhere.

Poof, game budgets go down.

Now, salaries and licenses will be higher than 10 years ago, because that's how pay raises and inflation works, but there are a lot of areas where the developers and publishers could cut costs. If they could not, we wouldn't have an AA industry where game budgets are like 20-50 million dollars instead of in the hundreds of millions like some AAA games cost to make. And these AA games can often compete with AAA games in how good they are, often even surpassing as they don't tend to be designed by committees and market research, but rather by passion.