Comment by 80fj0348i

Some of that inflation is because localizing games takes more people now. Back in the day it might have been one person per language for 2-10 languages translating text only. Now you might also need a full cast of voice actors for each language + writers and directors for each language, over a wider number of languages.

Some of that is the standard for bugs has changed. Games do still ship with bugs but back in the day the standard was just "be playable to the end and don't crash" Now there's a complex certification process to validate the game's behavior against the system's host OS, and if the game has online features you have to test against cheating and exploits. Check out some of the bugs that speedrunners exploit in older games that let them manipulate the contents of memory, that would be considered insane today. So you need a lot more QA staff than back in the day.