The rising cost of play: AAA games, consoles, and GPUs surge in cost

[DragonSlayer101]

The big picture: Historically, video game console prices have fallen over time as manufacturers prepared for the next generation of hardware. However, the current generation – Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch – has defied that trend. Instead of getting cheaper, these consoles have actually become more expensive since launch, marking an unusual break from decades of tradition.

For example, the flagship Xbox Series X launched at $499.99 in November 2020 but now sells for $599.99. The more affordable Series S originally carried a $299.99 price tag, yet the base 512GB model now starts at $379.99. Want the 1TB version? That'll cost you an extra $50.

Sony's PlayStation 5 also saw an increase, moving from its $499 launch price to $549 today. Meanwhile, Nintendo raised the original Switch from $299.99 to $339.99. The Switch OLED goes for $399.99, and the Switch Lite costs $229.99.

Game prices have climbed as well. For about 15 years – spanning from the mid-2000s until around 2020 – AAA console titles held steady at $60. Today, $70 is the new norm, as rising development costs and market pressures pushed major publishers to adopt a $10 price hike across the board.

This year, several publishers including Nintendo and Microsoft pushed toward the $80 price point, citing rising development costs and increasing game complexity. However, after significant public backlash, Microsoft reversed course and pledged to maintain current pricing for all its upcoming holiday releases.

While some gamers and industry watchers attribute these price hikes to corporate greed, others point to new import tariffs as the primary culprit. Additionally, years of inflation have contributed to the unusual trend of aging consoles becoming more expensive today than at launch.

Whatever the cause, gamers are spending significantly more on their hobby than they were just a few years ago, and many are understandably unhappy about it. The situation is even worse for PC gamers, as graphics card prices have yet to normalize after reaching astronomical highs during the pandemic.

Whether prices will continue climbing in the coming years remains uncertain, but gamers are hoping the worst is behind them.

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The rising cost of play: AAA games, consoles, and GPUs surge in cost

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Stop buying. Quit Consooooming. We all can see the objective decline in quality of games, the rising cost, the greedy actions of the industry, yet you keep BUYING. So long as dollars flow into the the furnace of the machine it wont stop.

There are decades worth of wonderful games out there you can buy for a pittance that run on a potato. There are multiple generations that are trivial to emulate and offer literal decades of entertainment. The PS2 alone has over 4000 titles. If you spent exactly 7 days playing just 1 game then never touched it again, it would take you 77 YEARS to play the entire library. Even if you shortened it to a day, that is still almost 11 years of gaming!

Just stop buying. Stop fueling the greed machine. If the dollars dry up, prices WILL come down.

 

[kira setsu]

Shouldn't have fell for the f2p trap, the companies now know the fanbase has cash to burn and theyre gonna get theirs.

 

[GeoffreyA]

Stop buying. Quit Consooooming. We all can see the objective decline in quality of games, the rising cost, the greedy actions of the industry, yet you keep BUYING. So long as dollars flow into the the furnace of the machine it wont stop.

There are decades worth of wonderful games out there you can buy for a pittance that run on a potato. There are multiple generations that are trivial to emulate and offer literal decades of entertainment. The PS2 alone has over 4000 titles. If you spent exactly 7 days playing just 1 game then never touched it again, it would take you 77 YEARS to play the entire library. Even if you shortened it to a day, that is still almost 11 years of gaming!

Just stop buying. Stop fueling the greed machine. If the dollars dry up, prices WILL come down.

That's the problem and what I don't understand: people can put a stop to all these things we complain about, but won't.

 

[godrilla]

I say if video games has some value to the overall psyche/anatomical health in terms of anichdotal and significant evidence (stress inducing, problem solving, driving, eye health via ocular muscle hyperplasia etc; mitigate use to cover that threshold of benefit minimum.
Update your resumes, learn a new trade, playing video games and trolling all day unfortunately doesn't pay the bills.
The time of efficient gaming schedules and efficient online trolling is upon us.
Update I can't believe Vermintide 2 just came out with another free map this month that I already somehow beat under the hardest difficulty. That's 1 free map almost per quarter and or 6 months.
No need to spend money on being a beta tester when I have a backlog of games I never played and Vermintide 2 keeps the free content and challenges coming.

 

[Megalomaniac]

I see no exclusives. PS5 and Xbox are currently dead to me.

I bought a Switch 2 and I'm having fun with it.

Otherwise, I'm having more fun playing older games with replay value. Despite having a souped up PC with a 5090 in it, I'm enjoying DCS World, Chess.com, Counterstrike, Command and Conquer Yuri's Revenge and a few games I bought on sale on Steam and Switch.

The only downside is the high cost of storage. Micro SD Express is a terrible format. Half-sized SSG cards in 1 or 2TB would be better. I will wait till Micro SD Express prices drop and get that 1TB or 2TB for the life of my Switch 2.

My 5090 will get its exercise when the real games start to come to market.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

That's the problem and what I don't understand: people can put a stop to all these things we complain about, but won't.

Problem is, for every one of us who is willing to put down the wallet, there are 2 or 3 more people who will uncritically consume whatever product may be new. Sure, they may complain, but it never occurs to them to stop. Companies have figured out that the masses will spend enough they dont have to listed to niche audiences anymore, in fact it is more profitable (in the short term).

It takes a major cultural shift assisted by sustained enshittification to affect mass change. Like what happened with Disney and Marvel/Lucasarts. The gaming industry ahs been more resilient, but it has happened on a smaller scale with Volition and now Ubisoft.

 

[OortCloud]

Just wait 6 months and buy them for a quarter the launch price or second hand. If enough people do that they might realise they have overcharged. Same with graphics cards. Terrible gains in the last gens of GPU so buy a cheap 30 series etc and wait it out. I'm sure AMD will cutting the 50 series prices soon too as they realise their greed has caused another generation of AMD GPUs to fail miserably.

 

[NumberNine]

So far for the entire year of 2025...

Kingdom Come Deliverance II has been the only thing worth buying, to me.

 

[airbornex]

Wild to think we’re living in a timeline where consoles age like fine wine… except instead of getting rarer and more valuable, they just cost more because of tariffs and inflation.

Honestly, if prices keep going up, I’m expecting GameStop to start offering financing plans like they’re selling Teslas. “That’ll be 36 easy payments of $19.99 for your Switch OLED, sir.”

 

[bviktor]

Oooh another article ignoring inflation, GG.

There's been a chart about this with inflation calculated in, and guess what, it's getting CHEAPER to game.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

They only cost more if you're stupid enough to buy a AAA (BTW this mean alpha alpha alpha) title on release.

 

[MaestroIT]

Yes, rising development costs, when most development is now done with ai, also support is done with AI and very soon graphics will be all ai (nano banano new model is a big proof)

 

[GeoffreyA]

Problem is, for every one of us who is willing to put down the wallet, there are 2 or 3 more people who will uncritically consume whatever product may be new. Sure, they may complain, but it never occurs to them to stop. Companies have figured out that the masses will spend enough they dont have to listed to niche audiences anymore, in fact it is more profitable (in the short term).

It takes a major cultural shift assisted by sustained enshittification to affect mass change. Like what happened with Disney and Marvel/Lucasarts. The gaming industry ahs been more resilient, but it has happened on a smaller scale with Volition and now Ubisoft.

Yes, reaching critical mass to boycott these corporations is close to impossible because consumers have internalised the brainwashing. Worse, some will defend the anti-consumer practices.

 

[Jack77]

That's the problem and what I don't understand: people can put a stop to all these things we complain about, but won't.

Yes, reaching critical mass to boycott these corporations is close to impossible because consumers have internalised the brainwashing. Worse, some will defend the anti-consumer practices.

Apart that for some people the high prices matter a lot less than for a whole lot others, it's also an emotional thing. People are indeed brainwashed that you mean something when you buy something, and that buying high-end / higher priced gear gives you higher status. And there's also the habit of buying a certain class of products and the 'defeat' when having to buy lower-tier items.

So the 'vote with your wallet' thing is certainly not straightforward.

 

[GeoffreyA]

Apart that for some people the high prices matter a lot less than for a whole lot others, it's also an emotional thing. People are indeed brainwashed that you mean something when you buy something, and that buying high-end / higher priced gear gives you higher status. And there's also the habit of buying a certain class of products and the 'defeat' when having to buy lower-tier items.

So the 'vote with your wallet' thing is certainly not straightforward.

I mean it in a sense also apart from money. For example, Windows. If people refused to upgrade to 11, Microsoft would have to wake up. But people give these corporations the licence to carry on with their practices.

With 8GB GPUs, the public has spoken, but that's more of a rarity.

 

[mrSister]

Vote with the wallet and stuff. But people can't stay away from those preoder buttons.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Oooh another article ignoring inflation, GG.

There's been a chart about this with inflation calculated in, and guess what, it's getting CHEAPER to game.

No it isnt. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, unless you use the gimped CPI caluclator the US government puts out. Once you factor in energy, housing, and food (you know, those things you NEED to survive) inflation has been a whole lot closer to ~20% per year the last 5 years or so. Just look at grocery prices now VS 2019.

Let's also not forget these game companies are setting record profits year after year, selling hundreds of millions of copies of games and making literal BILLIONS. Oh yeah, and Expedition 33 was super profitable at just $50, while being way more "game" then anything AAA ahs pushed out the last half decade.

 

[JuanDegr]

If everybody (at least on pc) focused on their pile of shame during these times, game prices would decrease pretty soon.

 

[madboyv1]

Stop buying. Quit Consooooming. We all can see the objective decline in quality of games, the rising cost, the greedy actions of the industry, yet you keep BUYING. So long as dollars flow into the the furnace of the machine it wont stop.

There are decades worth of wonderful games out there you can buy for a pittance that run on a potato. There are multiple generations that are trivial to emulate and offer literal decades of entertainment. The PS2 alone has over 4000 titles. If you spent exactly 7 days playing just 1 game then never touched it again, it would take you 77 YEARS to play the entire library. Even if you shortened it to a day, that is still almost 11 years of gaming!

Just stop buying. Stop fueling the greed machine. If the dollars dry up, prices WILL come down.

I agree with the sentiment, for years I've been revisiting my old library of games rather than jumping on the latest trendy game of the month. I feel like the biggest hurdle for (especially older) console games is accessibility to that library after said console has gone EOL and almost no attempt is made to try and make their expansive libraries available in some legal fashion, whether it be because of greed, the drive to push consumers to the "latest and greatest," or simply due to licensing expiring on especially older games.

Then there is the shift from physical to digital only media which in itself is often treated as a license to play and not own to play (just one more example of enshitification), often requiring online components to be active or relying on a digital storefront for access that, once it goes dark you're generally stuck with what you got on that device with little recourse to transfer it somewhere else.

Some positive ground has been laid in the form of Xbox Gamepass, Playstation Plus, and Switch Online and it's expansions, but these are heavily curated (pruned down) and are active subscription models in a world where the consumer is becoming increasingly fatigued at everything becoming a subscription, though still easier to swallow than a $60+ single purchase game. At least there's GoG and Steam (to a lesser extent) for PC, but considering the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of games released on various computer platforms in its 45+ year history, what they provide is just a bucket floating in an ocean, nevermind the difficulty running some of these games even with software such as dosbox.

(Which reminds me as a tangent, I have a cache of very old PC games from the 80s, I should try and see if the physical media has held up and if so, transfer them for a digital backup...)

Then there's the consumer perception that "newer is better" which often proved patently false with some of these disastrous releases and lack of support, but that's another conversation entirely.

 

[fadingfool]

Can't afford the most powerful GPU to play the latest games at 4K 120fps+? Then don't. Aim for 1440p 75fps and games without enforced ray-tracing and your options open up markedly. Or even 1080p 90fps and the PC world is your proverbial sea mollusc. Steam sales, Epic sales, GOG sales, Green Man gaming and humble bundle sales - you'll never need to spend more than $20 for a choice from a huge collection of great games. There are so many good deals on older games it isn't even worth the effort pirating them (unless it is to remove the fps sapping copy protection... but buy the game as well ok?). I use my PS5 mainly for media consumption (prime, netfix, HD blu-ray) rather than gaming as there hasn't been anything worth the additional PS tax to play in a long time.

 

[Tantor]

Interesting article. Housing prices have tripled since the early 2000's. But computer and game prices have not tripled.

 

[fadingfool]

Interesting article. Housing prices have tripled since the early 2000's. But computer and game prices have not tripled.

Computer games are not an asset and in limited supply.

 

[Mtyson8]

I honestly don't see the big deal of a game going from $60 to $70, even $80. Nintendo, SNES and Genesis PS1 games in 1985-1999 were always around $50, and games are the ONLY thing that has held steady all these 40 years! We are in 2025, so to me another $10 or $20 dollars is NOTHING! How much are programmers getting paid vs what they did in 1988? How much are shipping and packaging costs in 2025 vs what they were in 1988? To me for the games to only jump to $60 in 35 years in nothing short of a miracle! We are only complaining because they jumped so little. If games were $129, we would be soo happy if they lowered back to $70!

Look at other things that have gone up. McDonalds had full meals for $2.99, Taco Bell 59¢, 70¢ and 99¢ items. Beers were $2 in the 90s. Now beers are routinely $7-$8, McDonalds large meals are $12, AND we pay to door dash everything at extra cost, then complain of cost. This doesn't stop us!

We are all just whiners

 

[Gastec]

Oooh another article ignoring inflation, GG.

There's been a chart about this with inflation calculated in, and guess what, it's getting CHEAPER to game.

In the world that I'm living in, which is outside the USA, inflation in the last two years has caused significant price increases, anything from 50% to double or even triple, for everythong from daily groceries to monthly bills, while our wages have barelly increased by 1 to 4%. That is the whole point of inflation, it makes you poorer. When your energy bills have tripled in price in just a few months then it doesn't matter if a video game has increased in price by "only" 40%.