Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. The sticker price might well be the same: you’re still paying $40 to $70 per game, depending on various factors (and obviously, we’re discounting “special editions” from consideration here).

But as Ars Technica points out, we were paying similar prices over a decade ago. Allowing and adjusting for inflation, that means that game prices have actually come down over time. This is a heartening trend, and actually one I expect to see continue, especially if (or as) games continue to beat out Hollywood in terms of revenue and audience.

Actually, the gaming market is kind of in a weird state at present, because there really appear to be two tiers of games out there. On the one hand, you have the mainline games, for consoles and PCs, which are typically priced in the aforementioned $40 to $70 range; you also have what could be called the “mobile” games (and in many cases, there are mobile versions of the mainline games that offer almost exactly the same plot and play experience), which rarely exceed the $10 price point.

And the mobile market, especially, is taking off.

My suspicion is that over time, we will see one of two things happen. If mobile games and mainline games remain largely independent of each other, I think we will probably see the surge in mobile gaming serve to force the price of mainline games down a bit more. On the other hand, if (as I’m hoping) we start to see more developers creating games for both mainline and mobile release, which can share save files between the mainline and mobile versions, we can probably expect to see prices on both platforms approach a kind of “golden mean”.