The even more shocking thing is that it was worth every cent; it was the first real experience many of us had in some medium to large scale world with day / night cycles, long term social interactions (I think I even got married at some point?!), ye olde English, ...

Young me figured out the rune writing after a few minutes of scribbling on paper, and after that did it purely visually (I didn't have the cloth and manual etc, got it with Creative Sound Blaster 16 CD and sadly never looked at the documentation). There were many puzzles I figured out alone and was super proud of. Those were super formative times, and Ultima 8, while cool in its own way, didn't have the same realtime speed and party control etc.

It had a real package with a map in it. That would be like buying a collector edition today at 200 USD

And devs make a lot more money for it. Modern day devs justifiably complain about having to give ~30% of their revenue to Steam or app stores, but back in the day you'd be lucky to get some sort of deal like a 20% "royalty" on sales after 100% of your publisher's costs were covered. So for each $60 spent (which as I recall was a more common price tag) something like $5-$10 would make its way to the studio.

And physical media meant that as soon as your game or software was off store shelves your revenue went to $0. And even when it was on store shelves, if it was popular it'd rapidly end up in the million 2nd hand resale shops where it'd cycle through potentially multiple players and you'd again get $0.

Given how studios were dropping like flies back in the day, I don't think they were gouging at $60 - it was just a very different environment.

I think I'd pay like 250 Eur for a massive Ultima game by Larian, in which they lean hard on the U8 style pentagram spells, you can at any point just become a baker or something, etc :D

Theres a modern port of starcon2 called masters of urquan