I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Games should be cheaper now, or at least the same price, despite inflation. With digital distribution, per unit costs are basically non-existent now, and audiences have ballooned.
Games were $50 in 2000, which would be around $95 today. But the biggest selling game at the time was The Sims*, which sold 50 million copies. GTA V has sold 230 million copies, and VI will more than likely beat that. Thats 2.5B vs 13.8B assuming all copies of both were bought at original MSRP (which is obviously not the case but for sake of comparison). Thats 4.8B vs 19.8B both in 2026 dollars.
The increase in price is especially absurd when you consider that we just jumped up to $70 as standard a few years ago. $60 was standard from like 2008 until like 2023, and now we’re jumping to $80 after just a couple years? We shouldn’t change to $80 until around 2040.
*Not counting Tetris which is a strange outlier that’s also counting all sorts of platforms over several decades.
It is really weird that games have the same price in digital and physical form. The studios should have made you switch to digital easier by reducing the price of digital games. Sony made the digital only console cheaper and that’s it.
If you don’t gaf about playing games right when they come out, the digital marketplaces do offer fairly deep discounts before too long. I just picked up the first 2 parts of FFVII remake at 70/75% off for example.
Shit, not just that, games used to get reduced in price without sales, now they seem to never go down in price unless it’s “on sale”. Like why the fuck is DS2 Scholar, an 11 year old game, still have a $40 base price on steam. It probably did come down from $60 I guess some years ago, but it’s really jarring that a 10+ year old game is still more than $20.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Games should be cheaper now, or at least the same price, despite inflation. With digital distribution, per unit costs are basically non-existent now, and audiences have ballooned.
Games were $50 in 2000, which would be around $95 today. But the biggest selling game at the time was The Sims*, which sold 50 million copies. GTA V has sold 230 million copies, and VI will more than likely beat that. Thats 2.5B vs 13.8B assuming all copies of both were bought at original MSRP (which is obviously not the case but for sake of comparison). Thats 4.8B vs 19.8B both in 2026 dollars.
The increase in price is especially absurd when you consider that we just jumped up to $70 as standard a few years ago. $60 was standard from like 2008 until like 2023, and now we’re jumping to $80 after just a couple years? We shouldn’t change to $80 until around 2040.
*Not counting Tetris which is a strange outlier that’s also counting all sorts of platforms over several decades.
It is really weird that games have the same price in digital and physical form. The studios should have made you switch to digital easier by reducing the price of digital games. Sony made the digital only console cheaper and that’s it.
If you don’t gaf about playing games right when they come out, the digital marketplaces do offer fairly deep discounts before too long. I just picked up the first 2 parts of FFVII remake at 70/75% off for example.
You could also do that with physical games, too, though.
Depends on the game, nintendo first party releases pretty famously never really dropped in price.
ah, but they did… see: Players Choice titles on N64 and GameCube. they’d reduce the price of the AAA first party games by $10 to $30.
Shit, not just that, games used to get reduced in price without sales, now they seem to never go down in price unless it’s “on sale”. Like why the fuck is DS2 Scholar, an 11 year old game, still have a $40 base price on steam. It probably did come down from $60 I guess some years ago, but it’s really jarring that a 10+ year old game is still more than $20.