Console games really benefited from economy of scale. The Legend of Zelda had an MSRP in 1986 of $50. That is $136 in 2022 money. You can preorder The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for $70, or roughly half the price.

Imagine how many more hours of labor goes into a modern game compared to a 1986 game. The 1986 game has nine people in the credits. Three people with the role "programmer". Two things kept prices in line. Reduced hardware costs, as the older carts are much more expensive. Increased sales, where more people buy the same software.

Throwing more people mostly making graphics, and creating movie like sequences where characters explain things isn't as hard with the tools available compared to making everything fit memory-wise making choices not faced today. Those three programmers interfaced with the hardware directly, solved os problems to get things working enough to put in a custom game engine they created into the smallest amount of memory before they can even start creating a world where there game could exist. The challenge today is how can I generate enough content to create a story to put into my unreal game engine. The 3d part, driver development, the memory management all is handled by something else.

Games for Nintendo consoles aren’t overpriced relative to games from past generations, but are expensive relative to PC games today. Sales promotions on PC platforms like Steam and GOG are more frequent and provide deeper discounts than Nintendo’s. And while AAA Nintendo games are roughly the same price as AAA games on Steam, old Nintendo AAA games retain much higher prices than old AAA games on Steam. (Example: Mario Kart 8 is nine years old and still sells for $60 not including DLC.)

A lot of the major Nintendo games are on sale this week (probably because of March 10 = MAR10), but even the oldest first‐party titles are only down to about $40 at the lowest.