That $80 videogame can still feed (entertainment to) a family of four for months.
see: comedies whose only funny scenes/jokes are included in the trailer
I've seen entitled rants from gamers yelling at the developer while also publicly admitting that they pirated the game.
People pay money for clothes and food too and you don't see them posting thirty-minute screeds on YouTube about how they don't like the pattern of this shirt they just got.
Food screeds though are very different depending on gender. I've watched my husband be able to watch a streamer dissect "Mr beast" chocolate for 90 mins.
I just watch Instagram reviews, and they can get pretty mean spirited.
Plus in both cases you can wait a while for reviews to come in.
Video games operate more like TV — with lots of filler that you don’t want but can put up with, and can’t really skip because there’s probably something notable interspersed (intentionally, to make it unskippable).
Honestly I’ve found that I can extract the vast majority of value from most single player games in a few hours (core mechanics and their interrelationships, anything interesting from the setting/world building/themes, aesthetic design, etc); some games can keep on trucking… but most of them are far longer than they are valuable.
If $80 is a significant purchase, then there are many, many ways to reduce the cost or mitigate the risk. You can wait for a sale, wait for the initial reviews to come in, wait for a friend to buy it and try it at their house, etc. The way you're phrasing it sounds like the buyer is forced at gunpoint to buy an $80 game every month, after being forced at gunpoint to buy a console that costs hundreds of dollars or a gaming PC that costs thousands.
If someone I knew purchased expensive items and was unhappy with them, yet continued to make the same poor purchases and was continually unhappy, I'm not sure the purchaser is blameless.
I offer as a comparison the wireless providers with 60% corporate profits that everyone pays - with a job or without one.
(although I do dislike the psychological manipulation and personal-info gathering games that grown)