Fact 1: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox announced this week that it will sell “some” of its upcoming video games for $80 — a hike from the previous standard price of $70, which itself was a hike from $60 just a few years ago. This comes in the wake of Nintendo Co.’s announcement last month that the new Mario Kart game for Switch 2 will be $80.
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Fact 2: The three highest-reviewed video games of 2025 so far, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic, are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince and Split Fiction. Those games cost, respectively, $50, $30 and $50.
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Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the best-rated games of the year just happen to be budget titles. But I think the two facts above point to something else — a critical flaw in the video-game industry’s operations that has contributed to its plateaued growth and widespread layoffs.
Very glad I dumped AAA in favour of indie
Players have near unlimited options to spend less than 20 dollars on incredible games.
Why do you need to buy only (current title). Have you finished all this the games made? For 80 bucks you can get into a few jrpg series, that are guranteed to be good, rather than risk your luck on some aaa slop.
Very rarely would I be willing to spend 60 on a game. They’re not getting 80 out of me unless they blow me while I play.
Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.
The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.
All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.
I’d rather buy 4 Indy games then 1 AAAAAA graphically enhanced shitpile
Only 4? Pretty sure you could double your catalog for the price of one oblivious remaster
This is just the way it works. Things stay the way they are until someone has the balls to make a change. Once one party does, all the other parties see it as a signal that they can also raise the price.
Remember when Android phones used to be like $400-500? Apple saw the end of that, others followed their lead. To this day you can still buy very good phones for that price, but the majority of phones have moved into the $1k+ market.
Honestly I’m okay with games being priced at whatever they’re worth instead of some arbitrary fixed price based on industry norms.
I feel the need to remind everyone that when I was buying NES cartridges in 1988 and 1989 at the ripe age of like, 6, they were like 39.99$, and SNES were usually 50$, unless you wanted something fancy like Secret of Mana where the cartridge had some special snowflake chips in it and shit. Entire birthdays’ gifts were combined into a single game I could buy, once a year at most.
I don’t know of literally anything else that cost 50$ in 1989 that only cost 50$ today.
But with everything else getting god awful expensive, it’s hard to stomach yet more things getting expensive too. I’m just pointing out that gas was like, 89c a gallon at the same time, so… yeah. I just find it wild that games haven’t really gone up in price alongside everything else over the same time period, it’s kind of super unique in that regard.
That’s true, but it’s also worth noting that as the industry as a whole has grown, even physical media only costs a few bucks. And as we’ve moved away from physical media, that number is effectively zero. So there’s no increased costs as they’ve scaled, only increased profits.
I’d hardly call $50 games “budget titles.” Is paying $30 for a meal at a steakhouse a budget meal just because that high-class $50 a plate reservation-only place exists?
I agree that price doesn’t equal quality, but I don’t feel so good about trying to normalize AAA $50 games as “budget titles.” And the link to the article is broken, so I am not sure what the greater context and points of the article are.
Budget title is definitely a stretch, but I think that was just poor word choice - the fact that those three games are less than the typical “AAA” price of $60 I think really proves their point that gamers by and large are choosing cheaper games — it’s the industry trying to push premium priced games.
Just so you have more reference. Original link is in OP’s link, but I think they had too many tracking arguments in the URL so wayback didn’t work. Always test before going live!
