(But it’s also heavily on sale right now, for $15 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/)
Personally, I don’t mind at all. For one I bought it at $30, but also I have 2,000 hours logged. Per hour that’s a cost of $0.02 per hour (at the new price) if I had bought it at $40. I’m all for calling out studios like ubisoft for being greedy, but coffee stain has done a very fair job with Satisfactory IMO, and they very well deserve $10 more for the game.
That being said, go pick it up now for $15
Not only material costs go up with inflation.
Those materials have a price because you need labor to obtain them. The cost of everything is driven by the price of labor. The price of labor goes up with inflation.
There is no product that is unaffected by inflation.
So you’re saying that because of that, all things must also rise in price, just inherently?
By your logic any movie released decades ago should cost far more now than it did back then, right? To rent or buy, it should be infinitely more. What about games from the 90’s or 00’s? They should be far more expensive.
Why don’t I have to pay 100’s of dollars every time I watch A Clockwork Orange? Why doesn’t it cost hundreds of dollars to play the original Half-Life? After all, counting for inflation they should all cost far, far more than they currently do. Actually take a second and think about it.
Why do you think buying a digital copy of something is cheaper than buying a brand new, physical copy? Because each physical copy had to be built from the ground up, taking all new materials to do so, whereas the digital copies can effectively be infinitely reproduced. They’re not affected in the same way.
Inflation is not the only factor in the pricing on products. Otherwise a potato would cost 1000x what it does.
Even then, all the things you mention are media that was already produced, and the only cost associated to them now is licensing and distribution. Satisfactory is still in production, which costs orders of magnitude more.
The costs of updates and bug fixes, ie maintenance, aren’t equivalent to building the game from the ground up.