Fallout co-creator, The Outer Worlds co-director, and all-round chatty RPG icon Tim Cain is back with another insightful industry vlog, this time breaking down the pros and cons of digital gaming, where he argues that digital storefronts are the reason why game prices haven't matched inflation. "You know those cost savings for being digital? Those should have been passed on to consumers when things went digital," Cain continued. "They didn’t. The argument I hear is, 'Well, costs were rising in development, so they were balanced.' I don't think they were balanced." $80 games have retreated for now, but analyst says the old $60 or $70 pricing model is dead in the "Wild West" of 2025: "I know a lot of people don't like it, but people still buy these games at these high price points" RPG legend Josh Sawyer says the reason classics like Baldur's Gate disappeared in the '00s was "because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them" An uber-rare Nintendo cartridge worth $1,000 sat in a Las Vegas retro shop for months until it sold for $12, and the store's owners aren't even mad about it: "Score! Our f*** up their gain" As you can probably see any time you turn on your Nintendo eShop, PSN, or Xbox Store, buying games digitally is essentially the same price (sometimes more expensive) than picking up a physical copy. But Cain also argued that, in the long run, digital gaming probably saved us from inflated prices overall. "Digital is probably the reason why games have resisted matching inflation because, I've said this before, I bought games for $59 in the '90s. That would have been a really expensive game these days. And these were standard games for like Super Nintendo. But those cost savings for digital weren't passed on to consumers," he concluded. Fallout creator Tim Cain says he was "ordered to destroy" his personal archive of the RPG's development: "Individuals and organizations actively work against preservation"