Also, people tend not to account for manufacturing drops. Cost to produce dropped dramatically when things moved from cartridges to optical formats. Dropped somewhat in the move to digital distribution, though not as much as you might think.

Removing significant printed instruction manuals helped, too. Printing has gotten really expensive over the last 30 years. Falcon 4.0 came with a spiral bound book written by an actual F-16 pilot, and it was basically an F-16 flight manual. Nobody expects that to ever happen again. Not with a base game, anyway. That game was about $53 at launch (going by the “Chips and Bits” ad toward the back of this old CGW magazine).

There’s a good $20-30 in reduced production costs that were never directly passed on to customers.