Ancient-Red-Dragon: Today, most publishers/devs are absolutely out to screw consumers with price gouging. The standard for video games used to be that $49.99 USD bought you a full game with at least 30 hours (at bare minimum) of hand-crafted, varied gameplay. That also included patches for six months to a year after release, many of which added new content, and all of which were free of charge.
Gersen: I think you have a very "embellished" memory of the past, I have been gaming long enough to remember of period where a full price bought you a full game with 2-3 hours of gameplay, no patch at all (unless the game was literally unplayable and was recalled).
Most of the older games were actually pretty short, often hiding it behind artificial padding (unfair difficulty forcing you to memorize the whole game, lack of continue/lives, useless grinding / backtracking, pixel hunting, etc...) a lot of the classical games can be finished in a couple of hours and some even in less than a single hour.
Also games were not always "complete", for example I had to buy Wing Commander 2, then buy Wing Commander 2 Speech pack, and then all the expansion were also sold separately (yes DLCs, without the DL part, already existed in 199X, Origin was pretty notorious for selling its games in "kits" and then reselling the "enhanced" CD version later) and often buying the extension was the only way to get a "patch" for the base game.
While I definitely agree that some devs abuse of DLC, micro transactions and the fact that they can release a broken game and patch it later, things were not prefect either in the past, there was tons of short, broken, padded, incomplete games sold at full price too. And devs who patched their games for months/years and released expansion for free were more the exception than the rule.
Yeah, this is the downside of the "good old gamer" community, here on GOG -- they tend to be blinded by nostalgia and just force themselves to remember the past as this perfect time for video games, when developers and publishers weren't greedy, and we were surrounded by great games alone. I played a lot of shitty games, growing up in the late 1980's / early 90's. And I mean *A LOT*. For every Day of the Tentacle there were ten or more crappy titles. Sure, today a lot of bad games are being released, and you have to really know how and where to look for the few great ones, but these people seem to forget it wasn't any different in the past. Plus, we now have the internet to help us make an informed decision, back then, all we had, to decide whether a game was good or bad, was the cover art, some blurry screenshots in the back of the box, a very vaguely descriptive blurb or, if we were lucky enough, a TV commercial or a gaming magazine review (if you were lucky enough to live in a country that had gaming magazines in the 80's and 90's, which I certainly wasn't). I think we live in a way better era for gaming, than ever before, to be completely honest.
Also, I love how he talks about "30 hours minimum" being the "then standard for video games" -- implying it was the standard for *ALL* video games. Well, unless all video games back then were RPGs -- which they weren't, I played many more genres, and I'm not all that into RPGs, to begin with, or I'd be screwed if that had been the case--, I don't see how a point & click adventure, a side scrolling beat'em up, a platformer or an action-adventure (all games that I played while growing up) could go on for 30 hours (minimum) without overstaying their welcome. As for the prices matching this length, again, not true. I did pay roughly the equivalent of today's €50 for some long games, true, but I also paid the same amount of cash for very short games, back in the day. Not that I regret having done it for some of those titles, as I ended up loving them a lot, but saying all video games back in the day offered players a 30 hour (minimum) experience is a downright delusion, not to mention a lie. And, again, I can't stress this enough, they weren't all great -- or even just good --, either, sorry to burst your nostalgia bubble, buddies...