That's the thing, the style of game release of the 90s is all but dead. Sure you can still find indy studios releasing in a 90s style, but you can't find the big players doing that. Now a lot of the big name games have switched to either a freemium model or a pay to play model.
You don't simply buy a game like Overwatch, you have to get a battle pass to keep playing. And you don't ultimately own overwatch, once blizzard is done with it, the game is over and you can no longer play it. Then there's the fact that to be competitive, these games often sell items and loot boxes. If you want to not always die, you end up needing to buy these perks.
That is a worst experience designed to milk money out of players as much as possible, more than what you'd be paying adjusted for inflation.
The entire genre of FPS is like this now. Unless you play the old games, you basically cannot get the old experience of setting up a server, maybe letting it be open to the public, and just playing a game with friends. Instead is a bunch of random dumb shit that you have to deal with.
From my point of view, 2006-2012 was a nadir of PC gaming. A string of unoriginal games or bad console ports.
I'm always happy to keep my mind open to alternate points of view, but I'd really struggle to name the big and cheap hits of that era.
That era in gaming had many releases that are still considered among the best games of all time, that pioneered trends that reshaped the whole industry. Almost every year had at least a couple such titles.
2004 GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2
2005 God of War, Need For Speed: Most Wanted
2006: TES: Oblivion, Gears of War, Okami
2007: Call of Duty 4, Portal, Bioshock
2008: Dead Space, Left 4 Dead
2009: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2
2010: Read Dead Redemption, Bayonetta, Starcraft 2
2011: Skyrim, Portal 2, Dark Souls
2012: XCOM, Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3, Far Cry 3
2013: GTA V, The Last of Us, DOTA 2
Red Dead Redemption still hasn't even come to PC yet, it's due out this year!
Okay, so I was the one who narrowed it to talking about PC games, but if we look at console gaming then it has got consistently cheaper.
Sonic & Knuckles cost around $60 in 1994 money, that's about $130 in today's money.
Games have got vastly cheaper, for decades they were consistently around $60 and it's only recently they've crept up.
But I'm not here to argue about 2006. I'm making a point that contemporary games are worse. I don't think it's even possible to make such a list for recent years. We get 1, at most 2 good games per year - and most of them are straight sequels with little to no innovation over their pre-pandemic predecessors. And not just on PC - across all platforms. Seriously, try to write down this list for the last 5 years and tell me it's not drastically worse than my list - and my list is of the allegedly worst period for gaming!
As for the prices. Most games were $50 until 2005 or so. A lot of PSX titles were $40. Then there's the trend of dicing up content into $10-20 DLCs in increasing quantities, meaning you're getting less of a game per purchace if you only buy the base version. A different kind of shrinkflation.
Get some fresher data mr LLM.
You used to get a lot of stuff in a game box that wasn't just the game though. Manuals were often very detailed, arguably works of art in their own right. Also the cost of producing and shipping games is way lower online than it was for physical copies. Companies all used to have to develop their own engines and tooling to build games, that cost is mostly just gone with Unity and Unreal now.
Last and definitely not least, there's way more competition in the gaming industry now, and that tends to drive prices down.