I’ve never really gotten over the price increase that video games saw when the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X launched in 2020. The jump from $60 to $70 for full-priced, triple-A titles might not have seemed like much at face value, but that extra $10 plus tax meant that my ability to buy games at launch was drastically reduced.
Apparently, I didn’t know how good we had it when buying games for just a measly $70 since Nintendo is hiking its prices for Nintendo Switch 2 games up to $80 for digital storefronts, and there are reports that physical copies might be $90 in some regions. Throw the rumors that Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to cost $100 onto the pile, and it looks like games are just going to cost a fortune now.
I didn’t think I’d ever say it, but I think I’m going to miss $70 games. Insert the Invincible meme here, I guess.
Do Whatever You Want, I Don’t Care, You’re Just Going To Do It Anyway
If Nintendo is raising its prices, we can expect the rest of the industry to follow its lead. It seems like publishers have been playing a financially irresponsible game of chicken when it comes to this very issue. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on game development isn’t sustainable since it requires every game released to be a massive hit, and a way to mitigate the risk is by selling games at a higher price. Unfortunately for developers and publishers, raising prices is a risky move since there’s no telling at what point they’ll be outpricing their target demographic.
Well, I think they’ve started to find it.
Gaming is getting too expensive for me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. $70 games were already pushing what I could afford, so I was leaning heavily on Xbox Game Pass to play a lot of the latest releases. Well, I was, until Microsoft jacked the prices up. And then jacked them up again. No more Game Pass for me, I suppose. Now, I’ll need to look back at the four-ish years that games were $70 with nostalgia, forcing myself to pretend like I could afford them while also getting to eat a full meal every night.
Nintendo could give the rest of the industry permission to increase their prices since, hey, if Nintendo’s doing it, they might as well do it, too. It’s too early to know for certain which publishers will be upping the price of their games, but I struggle to see a reality where publishers have the option to make more money to recoup development costs and increase profits and don’t take it.
Setting the bar at $80 and potentially $90 also gives Rockstar the opportunity to slap the rumored $100 price tag on GTA 6 since, now, the $10 or $20 price increase is a lot smaller than a whopping $30 increase. And, similar to how I imagine publishers feel about Nintendo, if Rockstar is going to do it and make even more money, plenty of other companies will happily follow their lead.
What’s The End Goal?
Gaming is going in a direction that I soon won’t be able to follow. The price of everything is going up. I can’t pay my rent, eat dinner every night, and play new games. Only one of those things is a luxury, and I’m not going to starve myself and my family for the opportunity to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at 60 frames per second.
The tricky thing is, I believe gaming should be for everyone. Art shouldn’t be something that requires a steep buy-in price and wads and wads of disposable income to engage with, but that’s just where we’re at with it.
I can only see one way out of this: the price increases are going to be so drastic that they significantly hurt publishers’ bottom line on account of most people not being able to afford video games. If games aren’t selling because they’re priced too high, prices will need to come down, which means games will need to cost less to make, and so on and so on. I don’t know if that’s likely, but what’s the end goal here? Are games just going to increase in price by $20 every five years for the rest of time?
Newsflash, Nintendo: I still make the same amount of money I made when games jumped up to $70, and I know for a fact that’s not going to change just because video games want to make an extra $20 off of me. I pretended like I could afford $70 games, but I just can’t keep pretending while games keep getting more expensive, no matter how many random background characters you put into Mario Kart World.