this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Gaming

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Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game (web.archive.org)
submitted 1 month ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] dax@beehaw.org 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 3 points 1 month ago

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.