Libraries are free in Finland and the UK, not sure about the rest of Europe, seems its a mix from a quick search. Sucks to pay for a library! I always assumed they were free all over the world.
I go up and down on it. Prices for games have basically gone down over time in real terms over time, but it does still seem a lot to drop a full 70 on a brand new game.
Fact is you dont need to do that anyway as 95% of games will be 50% off within a year or two. You pay the premium if you are willing and able, otherwise just wait a bit and play something older in your price range. With Epic and a PC you can dine for free, or you can grab a lot of really good games for less than 10 each whenever theres a sale on any store, and a lot of those games have as many hours as the new hotness anyway.
Thus: Hype.
If marketers hype something up enough, it's easier to get people to dump money on the highest purchase price.
Cost doesn't equal value. This thread is about how much you pay before you know if you will get any value. The initial cost.
Value is an unknown until you have it. It is subjective. You can use it to determine if cost is worth it but you don't know for sure until you try.
It is much easier to figure out now with internet than before. So many blind purchases. Hard to know if you still be listening to album that week, let alone years later. Now if you wanted to buy music, you could choose a streaming service that lets you buy the albums at any stage... so listen before buying. Shame games companies don't offer that.
This is what I love about Bandcamp; I find new music all the time, listen to it and decide I'm not interested in it any further and I never had to drop a single dime. That said, I have spent a lot of money on Bandcamp in recent years, because I'm always finding something new to love.
Games are just generally so low value to me these days. Music I can at least listen to while I'm doing something else, such as driving, but games must be focused on to be used appropriately. And with the massive size of my PC library, not even counting all the emulation I also do, a new game has to be doing something really eyecatching for me to spend an appreciable amount of money on it, given I have very limited income as a stay-at-home parent. Any time a new game comes out and I start feeling the anticipation over the internet, I start combing through my library to see what I have that's similar and will give me an experience that sounds the same.
Everything else, I don't mind dropping money on. New book? Buy it (after a sample, of course). New Restaurant? Hell yeah, let's do it. Everything else just has such a higher value proposition because I either don't do it a lot, don't have a lot of it or I can work it into the rest of my life fairly easily without disruption. A game has to be really good for me to set aside extra time for it and there really aren't many.