Update thanks to thethatfox:
Physical game cards may also not actually contain the game:
Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview
Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your “key” to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
Update 2: There is probably a difference in Game-key cards and card that contain real game data. So we don’t know right now how often these game-key cards are used or if nintendo is using them.
They’ve been inflation proof because consumers lose their shit so hard with every price increase. The price of games is just much more visible and much more conceptually ingrained than with most other products, so every increase hits consumer awareness that much harder.
Prices instead increased in other more indirect ways. Micro-transactions in their many forms are the most obvious case. The price of your “full game” may not have gone up, but then there’s a nearly limitless trickle of smaller supplementary purchases adding to the cost.