My main things are.
1) Gaming can be drastically cheaper now than it was back in the 80's & 90's.
The big AAA games on the SNES were $60-$80 which is similar to what they are now, but with inflation taken into account, games are drastically cheaper.
There are freemium games & free games now which weren't really a thing back then, other than say Microsoft Solitaire & Minesweeper.
On any day of the week, you can find thousands of high-quality games on the digital stores for dirt-cheap (both naturally dirt-cheap indie games, and extremely discounted high-budget games).
The average length of games is drastically higher now. Something like Persona 5 or Elden Ring would have been unheard of. Single-player games that you could play indefinitely were largely unheard of, outside the occasional exception like Nethack. Buying an expensive new game and finishing it in under 10 hours was a real worry back on the NES & SNES.
There are subscription services that give you access to hundreds of games for a small fee each month.
For a period of time, there was the whole Mini Console fad. If you had told me that at some point, you could pay $80 USD and get a bundle of many of the best SNES games ever made along with some hardware to play them on, I wouldn't have believed you.
2) The cheap and free gaming options are the most popular games in the world.
When most of the world thinks videogames, they think Minecraft, Fortnight, Genshin Impact, LoL, Pokemon Go, Rocket League, Among Us, Candy Crush, Phasmophobia, Stardew Valley, and the like. Treating those experiences like they're inferior is ridiculous. Treating mobile gaming like it isn't real gaming when that's the kind of games most of the world wants is seriously out of touch.
3) Competition is insane now.
Making a Metroidvania? It had better be as good as Hollow Knight, 20+ hours long, and heaven help you if you want to charge more than $15.
Making a Diablo-like? You're up against Path of Exile, a freemium game that has had over a decade's worth of updates and content expansions.
Making a AAA game? Your game could have a 90%+ Metacritic, provide over a hundred hours of content, and people will still nitpick every little thing that it doesn't do perfectly. If Chrono Trigger came out now, people would be complaining that it reuses assets heavily, the game's too easy, and there's too much downtime in combat.
Yes, gaming can be an expensive hobby depending on the experience you want, and yes, the prices aren't in line with the cost of living in some countries, but there are cheap options the likes of which the hobby has never seen before.
