You are, again, oversimplifying so hard you are entirely wrong at that point.

For one thing, no, Doom didn't outsell Windows 95. That's a bit of a misquote from a thing Gabe Newell said once about MS doing a study on their Win95 penetration and finding it was ranking behind Doom at that point in time. Doom sold a few million units, between 1 and 3, by most counts. Online reference puts Win95 paid installs at 40-50 million. Made me look that up. I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast but I'm going to assume that's hyperbole, considering I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast.

But yes, games sell more copies now than they did in the 90s. Which I actively pointed out in my previous post, as part of a full on breakdown of how the perceived "full price" of a game has remained stable and that you're entirely ignoring here. GTA V has sold an insane amount of copies, but it's a massive outlier. Most games don't move 100 million copies, even when given out for free, in the same way most NES games didn't sell the 40 million copies Super Mario Bros sold. Most games move anywhere betwen a hundred thousand and a few million units. Steam, PlayStation and the other storefronts keep between 10 and 30% of that revenue, taxes keep some other chunk and publishers and devs split the rest, depending on how their relationship is arranged.

That needs to pay for anywhere between a handful and several hundred people for anywhere between six months and five years, give or take. The average salary in the US gaming industry is six figures. You do that math.

Would you still get games if that house of card fully collapsed? I mean, yeah, you'd get games in post-nuclear Mad Max wastelands, too. Gaming is inherent to humanity. Would you want a gaming industry that is entirely restricted to whatever sixty bucks per copy gets you for eternity, inflation be damned? I mean, I wouldn't.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a ton of time with small indie games. But I also spend a ton of time with larger games. I don't want any of them to go away. I will play the next Balatroesque, guy-in-a-garage roguelike that catches my attention, but I sure would like to also get to play a large narrative action game, a AAA fighting game or another big RPG an MMO or whatever else. I am extremely not game for the games industry to have to work within the confines of whatever iteration of monetization you don't think is exploitative because you grew up with it. You aren't the arbiter of what is a "scam", and you determining that subscriptions are fine because you liked playing WoW or that arcades were fine because you remember Mortal Kombat fondly or that sixty bucks is the "right" price for a videogame because that's what you paid for San Andreas doesn't mean it's the subset of options that make sense forever.

You've built a mental model of the industry, and that's fine, everybody does. But it's unreasonable for you to want that mental model to be the only valid version of a videogame that everybody gets to play. This whole conversation stems from the observation that younger people are looking nostalgically at what people like you were calling a scam in the early 00s. Me included, incidentally. It's a good exercise to get over ourselves and understand both the business reasons and the appeal that lead to each iteration of this business and art form getting popular. Turns out there was some gold in the Flash game shovelware mines, apparently, and I missed it. If you want to be the old man yelling at clouds about how games should be in a DVD for 60 bucks forever, goddamnit, I can't stop you. But you're wrong about the facts of how the industry works and why the costs are the way they are. That much is not opinion.