Fact 1: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox announced this week that it will sell “some” of its upcoming video games for $80 — a hike from the previous standard price of $70, which itself was a hike from $60 just a few years ago. This comes in the wake of Nintendo Co.’s announcement last month that the new Mario Kart game for Switch 2 will be $80.
…
Fact 2: The three highest-reviewed video games of 2025 so far, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic, are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince and Split Fiction. Those games cost, respectively, $50, $30 and $50.
…
Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the best-rated games of the year just happen to be budget titles. But I think the two facts above point to something else — a critical flaw in the video-game industry’s operations that has contributed to its plateaued growth and widespread layoffs.
This is just the way it works. Things stay the way they are until someone has the balls to make a change. Once one party does, all the other parties see it as a signal that they can also raise the price.
Remember when Android phones used to be like $400-500? Apple saw the end of that, others followed their lead. To this day you can still buy very good phones for that price, but the majority of phones have moved into the $1k+ market.
Honestly I’m okay with games being priced at whatever they’re worth instead of some arbitrary fixed price based on industry norms.
I feel the need to remind everyone that when I was buying NES cartridges in 1988 and 1989 at the ripe age of like, 6, they were like 39.99$, and SNES were usually 50$, unless you wanted something fancy like Secret of Mana where the cartridge had some special snowflake chips in it and shit. Entire birthdays’ gifts were combined into a single game I could buy, once a year at most.
I don’t know of literally anything else that cost 50$ in 1989 that only cost 50$ today.
But with everything else getting god awful expensive, it’s hard to stomach yet more things getting expensive too. I’m just pointing out that gas was like, 89c a gallon at the same time, so… yeah. I just find it wild that games haven’t really gone up in price alongside everything else over the same time period, it’s kind of super unique in that regard.
That’s true, but it’s also worth noting that as the industry as a whole has grown, even physical media only costs a few bucks. And as we’ve moved away from physical media, that number is effectively zero. So there’s no increased costs as they’ve scaled, only increased profits.