Gamers like to make it sound like $70 is a new thing today for video games. When, I’ve seen adverts of games back in late 90s and early 90s that were priced $70. It’s always been around so I find it ridiculous that so many of them complain that the pricing is too high when, it’s been a thing.
Even more dumb is that sales are stupidly frequent so why even bother trying to pay $70 anyways besides FOMO.
That’s the second generation of Genesis/Megadrive, so at that point they were probably selling it as a loss leader having minimised production costs.
The real money is in the games, so you make the console cheap and create more customers for the games.