Board Games

You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:

Tone, please. This is a friendly discussion, there's no call to be getting riled up. If you are, I suggest stepping away for a bit, or just dropping it entirely.

As should be clear from my previous comment, I had no idea what your point is because

1. You brought up a game I had never heard of
2. It's a game that's 4 decades old
3. It released at a pretty average price
4. It's currently a collectible, not a game in print / circulation, hence currently costs a lot

1st thing aside, I think it's fairly obvious why I had no idea what your point was.

Anyway, moving on. We're discussing the trend of the hobby as a whole. Not a single cherry picked product. Your argument and example is also pretty disingenous. It's an entire series of products that's been releasing in bits and pieces for a decade. A similar counter-example I could bring up would be Magic The Gathering. How much would it have cost to buy every single card WotC has released in the past 10 years? And that's just cardboard. Obviously, cost of physical components has very little to do with RRP in the case of these games. Which invalidates the whole 'Games would get cheaper if they used cheaper components' argument.

These companies would argue that you're not paying for the cost of the physical product, you're paying for the design work, marketing, etc that goes into each release. Which to be fair, does exist to some extent. That said, the franchise owners are fairly obviously milking them for money hand over fist. The thing is, that's hardly applicable to boardgame publishers as a whole.

Your other example, Chinese Chess, is also pretty bad for reasons: As you point out, it's been around for millenia. Nobody's getting paid to design and market the game. Without the need for marketing, distribution (which mostly involves getting it onto shelves in front of eyeballs and is essentially just another form of marketing), and royalties, modern games would also cost a fraction of what they currently cost. With the downside that, y'know, game publishers everywhere would starve to death and the entire game industry would collapse. I do think distribution takes way too huge a cut of the final cost, but that's a major unrelated tangent.

TLDR: Respectfully disagreeing with your argument thus far because it's pretty irrelevant to the actual topic at hand. I do actually agree that prices are going up, I just don't think you've done a great job arguing your point. I'd love to continue discussing this, in a friendly manner. Actually, hold that thought. I'll probably create a discussion post for this. It's fairly interesting to see what people are thinking about this issue.