One of the big focal freakout points of 2023 in gaming (apart from two women kissing, apparently) has been the fact that Sony, followed by Microsoft, followed by Nintendo, have all bumped the prices of their first-party triple-A games up to $70. It’s kicked up a bit of fuss right here on these pages, as we’ve had some writersquestioning whether Tears of the Kingdom should be $70, while others have been assuring us that the$70 hike is somewhat nullified by Game Pass, especially when some of the $70 games in questionturn out to be borderline broken on release.
Obviously, no one likes a price hike, but is this price hike really as drastic as some of us are making it out to be? Is thisreallysuch an expensive time to be a gamer? Well, as someone who was around during the glory days of cartridge-based consoles and physical-only distribution, let me tell you that the answer to both questions is a resounding ‘no,’ and I’ve done some inflation calculations to prove it.
Let’s rewind back to an era that at least some of you will be familiar with: the 5th generation, when the PS1 and N64 duked it out for dominance over our boxy CRT TVs. Perhaps one of the big advantages that the PS1 held over the N64 back then was the fact that its games were disc-based, therefore much cheaper to manufacture and sell than the N64’s cumbersome cartridges. There was pretty big variation in the price of new major N64 games around 1998, but generally it was in the $60-$70 range—which is $113-$132 adjusted for today’s inflation. Some games, like Turok, even retailed for $80, which would be a whopping $151 today!
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New PS1 games tended to come in at $40-$50, which waswaycheaper than N64 games (and a big part of why I made the controversial switch from N64 to PS1 circa. 1999), but you’re still looking at $80-$100 in today’s terms. One of the best things about PS1 games was the Greatest Hits Collection (or Platinum Collection here in the UK), which gave older top-selling PS1 games and sold them for $19.99 ($40 in today’s terms).
Still, none of this was exactly a bargain, especially when you consider that back in the day games had significantly smaller development teams and were made on much smaller budgets, even taking inflation into account. OnWikipedia’s list of most expensive games ever made, only two (Shenmue and Final Fantasy VII) are from the 90s, while the vast majority of the list is made up of games released after 2010.
Things were pretty similar back in the NES days, when you could expect to pay $40-$50 ($112-$140) for 8-bit little NES games. It’s only with the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox era that games started getting relatively cheaper, with the $50 MSRP for new high-end games amounting to about $84 in today’s terms.
So it seems that by and large, mainstream ‘triple-A’ games are more expensive to make now than ever, yet actually cost less to buy than in past generations. But of course there are other factors at play; this price hike comes at a time when many people are feeling the pinch of a floundering global economy. On a historical scale this is a good time to be a gamer when it comes to competitive pricing (especially with the many means of price-tracking, and instantly comparing the price of a game at dozens of online retailers), but at this moment as we’re seeing the price of regular daily essentials creep up, a price hike on games can feel like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are twisting the knife on us.
The timing couldn’t be worse really, and where one of the console manufacturers could’ve stood out from the others, and stood by consumers, by holding their ground on game pricing, they’ve all instead decided to up their prices almost simultaneously, establishing a pricier new norm.
But maybe at times like these it’s worth remembering that once upon a time we’d pay $150 for Turok, and I once paid the equivalent of $61 for some crappy N64 fighting game called Rakuga Kids because it was the only thing in the Electronics Boutique 2nd-hand bin that I could afford in 1998.
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