Well, as inflation becomes more and more significant in today's economy, prices will rise. Realize that the Commodore 64 was originally $595 and only cost ~$135 to make, then look at the PS3 being made at cost -- being sold at a price less than it takes to make it. (I don't know if that's still true because optimizations have no doubt been made in its manufacture.)
Look at the cost of games: new games have been ~$50 on release for the majority of the console/pc gaming market's lifetime. But comparing the production costs and quality of, say, ET on Atari (one guy was given less than a month to make it) versus the mammoth effort required for Grand Theft Auto 4 or a recent Call of Duty game shows that the $50 product are widely disparate in actual value. Even if you disregard inflation, that's still true. And it's still true that the majority of NES and earlier games take less effort to make than most indie games or Flash games do today, despite originally being priced for much more.
Part of that's because gaming's become bigger and bigger, so that they can afford much less profit on each unit. Part of that's because pricing conventions are hard to break, and the company that increases the price first will suffer a disadvantage in competition and a bad reputation. Once the first company's broken the ranks in the pricing schemes, more will follow from a safe distance.
Ultimately, entertainment industries are ruled by what people are willing to pay. ~$50 for a new game has persisted for a while, but is already falling apart as production costs get higher and higher. I won't say that increasing the cost of games will make them better, but it will keep the companies alive longer to spit out more.
