I am floored at how cheap games are these days.

Ultima IV had a street price of $50-55; in 1985. That's ~$130 in 2019. Teams were far far smaller then. Of course a "successful" game was also a far different standard; as within 4 years of release it had sold only 400,000 copies; despite being a pretty great game.

Whenever people talk about how expensive games are I feel very very old, because games (and the systems) used to actually be expensive.

The C64 was an amazing budget system, and was originally $595. That's like $1600 today. Yes it was a "computer" as well, but people balk at the price of $300 systems today and call $1000 computers too expensive.