You can find a free PDF for most TTRPG. You can play absolutely poor with theatre of the mind, or you can go full consumer on the IP and order all sorts of fun devices.

Personally I need at least a battle map, but all other things can be made from junk around the house. No figures needed!

What trends to balloon the price of board games is miniatures, since mold casting is very expensive, and 3D printing is generally too low throughput for commercial products.

Some definitely seem disconnected from reality. Sometimes it's as simple as someone trying to recoup on losses from a less successful game/print. Not many people involved in games are making much money, I know some people in that industry and it's not even able to support any of the designers or anyone I know as their full time thing. And these folks work on pretty well known stuff: History Channel licensed stuff, Shadowrun, Catalyst & Fantasy Flight games.

I've never bought a game personally, just played what other people were willing to fork out for.

what game was it? just curious

also print & play games: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamecategory/1120/print-play

Niche hobby with a high lead in for returns (if you put money towards making a board game, it's going to be a while before you see any returns, let alone hitting your production costs) and it's pretty risky. While things like d&d are pretty popular, the reach any one game from a new developer has is pretty limited unless it gets chance mentioned by someone on critical role.

a mate of mine spent $90 on digimon card packs last night, got like 7 cards out of it he actually liked, and he was happy about that. there was literally a stack of like 100 junk cards next to the "good" ones. its insane to me