The $70 Price Tag Was Never About Inflation

This record is sample content. It exists so the Deep Dives archive could be designed and reviewed before the editorial pipeline produced real investigations. Nothing below was researched, and no community threads are cited because none were read. The card and this page say so in the open.

What the real investigation will cover

• What the budgets behind the first $70 releases actually did
• How the rise interacted with deluxe editions and early access
• What happened to the games that held the lower price

Why this record exists

The archive’s layout is driven by the shape of a record — how long a headline runs, how many threads it cites, how many editorial notes are open at once. Reviewing that layout needs more than one record, so these samples supply the variety.

dataStatus: placeholder in the frontmatter and the notice on the listing page are what keep them from being mistaken for published work. When a real investigation claims this slot, delete this file and drop its two replacements — the record and, optionally, src/assets/deep-dives/the-70-dollar-price-tag-was-never-about-inflation.jpg. No code changes.