I worked in the industry a while back when those prices were set, and he does not even mention several factors 1.) games sold in stores required a concrete date

I worked in the industry a while back when those prices were set, and he does not even mention several factors 1.) games sold in stores required a concrete date for shelf space with an agreement with large retailers for shelf placement and kiosks, better cost the publisher more concessions IIRC, the game publisher sold the game for half the retail price to retailers so they were making say $30 out of the $60, ballpark estimates of sales were used to set budgets and almost everyone tried to time release for optimum sales period of Christmas shopping, setting the date - often years in advance, so that's why the time crunch problem was/is an issue, most games sold an extremely high percentage within a month of release often > 90% at least at full retail price (I can't remember if the publisher had a penalty for those that didn't sell after a while) 2.) many console games required a contracted number of actual physical media burned at a certain date so the publisher had to predict sales, a popular console might have limited timeslots for production to sell to game publishers and overshooting the mark on physical media is a loss and undershooting means lost sales at retail price so this makes console more high stakes than PC games in a way for publisher (Nintendo being console maker and publisher changes this somewhat for them alone), also the surcharge the console makers charged publishers was $10 per physical media produced in PS3/360 days, this had not changed from Game Boy days when we looked into making a new cartridge game when those games sold for $30-$40. Obviously the situation has changed and I don't know what the numbers are now, and some of these are alleviated/changed by the availability of digital only versions of games.