I don't see it working, for several reasons:
01. The market is completely saturated with games. And individual games themselves are now saturated with content. When you release games at a clip that people cannot realistically keep up with, it just makes it easier to wait for a price drop, because what is the point of buying something before you have time to play it? And with games being loaded to the gills with non "critical path" content, people will pour more hours into the games they own. In 2011, it was to delay trade ins which resulted in new copy sales being lost to second hand sales. In 2024, it is "engagement" to keep people playing and spend more on the game, be it expansions, microtransactions, or (I'm looking at you, Sega) New Game +.
02. There are really two major categories of gamers these days - people who buy a lot of games and have a very healthy backlog, and people who spend hundreds of hours each year on the same games. These are not mutually exclusive either, I'm sure plenty of people do both. Either way, you have people who have plenty of entertainment in front of them and do not need to be paying more than $70 on a new release.
03. The only games that could realistically sell in high volume at a higher than $69.99 MSRP on standard editions are the games that already make the most money - Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, etc. This is a "rich get richer" scenario, not a path that would do much good for publishers or developers on the bubble. It would not correct the "sustainability" issue at all. It is far more likely to exacerbate the problem.
The industry created a product saturation / glut problem, and it will be up to the industry to find a way to navigate through it. I think Game Pass Ultimate and PlayStation Plus Premium were an attempt at solving this, but ultimately run into the same problems when you are talking about people who already have a bunch of unfinished or yet to be played games. The cumulative pricing ($363 per year, before taxes) also makes it a tough sell for anyone to subscribe to both, and that assumes they either own both (still relatively expensive consoles) or one of the consoles and a gaming capable PC. And once you've got a gaming capable PC, you've likely got even more of a backlog on Steam and can routinely purchases discounted games either directly through steam or on reputable key sites.
Outside of some of very major properties, more expensive games would find themselves in the same scenario as streaming services outside of the
top five: a massive discrepancy in subscribers / purchasers.