[Console Games] Have video games become unaffordable?

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Video gaming can be an expensive hobby. Nintendo’s latest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart World, released in June, costs $80, and it’s widely expected that Grand Theft Audio VI, coming out next year, will top $100. So, are games becoming unaffordable, or do gamers not know how good they’ve got it? Super Mario is known as one of the most po[CENSORED]r game characters globally. But some fans haven’t been thrilled with the price tag on his latest outing, Mario Kart World. If you look online, you’ll find legions of gamers complaining that they’re now having to fork out a day’s wages to buy the latest titles. So do they have a point? Well, maybe — or maybe not. “I did an analysis for the U.S. video game markets, and I found that when you account for inflation, new games were valued between $90 to $100. And so when the new prices from publishers are coming out at the $80 or $90 mark, they feel expensive,” said Sam Naji, a video games analyst who’s been working in the industry for more than 15 years. “In relative terms, when you look at historical prices, they're actually on par with what they were before.” So, why might games feel more expensive, even if they’re not? One argument is we’ve been spoiled. Huge games like Fortnite, for example, are completely free to download and play, making their money instead from microtransactions in the game. This impacts public perception of the whole industry. Naji added that “full price games are now competing against those games, which are essentially free; therefore, consumers feel that they're paying somewhat more than they should be.” There is an argument, though, that even if game prices have remained relatively stable in real terms, they should, by rights, have gotten cheaper. Patrick Moran, curator of an international touring exhibition about the history of video gaming called Game On, said the reason games on early consoles, like the Nintendo Entertainment System, were expensive had very little to do with the game itself — and a lot to do with how it was packaged. “Cartridges, because they contained microchips and particularly memory chips, were really expensive. So about half the cost of the retail cost could be just the actual production of the cartridge,” said Moran. “And then that really changed in the mid-90s when you moved to CDs, when you suddenly had very, very cheap media.” The reason games didn’t get cheaper then is, apparently, the same reason they don’t get cheaper now — even though they can be downloaded directly, cutting packaging and shipping costs completely. And that’s because of what consumers have come to expect. Puzzle game Monument Valley released the third title in its series earlier this year, and Jane Campbell, a team member of that puzzle game, said more and more work goes into each game. “Every time we're making a new game, we want to make something that is bigger and newer and utilizing new gaming mechanics and bringing new surprises to our audience,” she said. “So the scope of games always increases, and that increase in scope looks at bigger team sizes.” Add to that an increasingly competitive environment — with more and more games coming out every year, as well as ever-rising wage costs — and Campbell said the cost of making a game has increased exponentially. “I think game companies tend to undervalue their games and sell them at lower price points than perhaps they should. It is very hard to make your money back on the investment of the games that we make,” Campbell added. “Consumers obviously want to pay lower prices. So it's very, very hard and it's very complicated to make money as a game company in this current space.” If you buy a cinema ticket for $10-$15, you’ll be entertained for a couple of hours. A good game, on the other hand, can keep you hooked for 20 or even 200 hours. And that’s got to be worth something.

https://www.marketplace.org/episode/2025/09/08/have-video-games-become-unaffordable