Has the average industry wage gone up 250%? If not, its not really inflation, just greed.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Not to mention that the audience for games is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger and the distribution costs in a mostly digital world, where it is difficult to actually own a game, are MUCH MUCH MUCH lower.
Add to that if you're playing on PC the hardware is significantly more expensive.
WE DON'T HAVE THE DAMN MONEY TO PAY FOR A FUCKING $90 MARIO KART GAME
And the prices back then were to offset the costs of physical distribution. Today, digital distribution costs publishers NOTHING.
These prices are not due to inflation, they are GREED.
I just went and checked on the cost of Mario Kart World out of curiosity. $110CAD for a digital download game for a mobile console. Holy shit. That is absolutely criminal.
Have wages gone up with inflation?
Seph Sterling has directly addressed this in the past. Inflation has no connection to minimum wage, or wages in general. Trickle down only happens if there's something forcing business owners to give that money to workers. Also, they aren't actually selling $60 games. They're selling $60 games with a bunch of gambling mechanics attached that tend to extract money from certain neurodivergant people, such as those who escaped gambling addiction and got into video games to help control it.
I would add that there have been times when the industry has reduced its cost, but that cost was never passed on to customers. The cartridge to CD transition, for example. That was likely in the neighborhood of a $20 reduction in cost, but games did not come down in price. They pocketed that money.
(The transition from CD to downloadable games did have a drop as well, though it's not as much as you might think.)
Software is also a business where you either pay millions of dollars for one copy, or we all pay a few dollars for millions of copies. Games generally pick the volume side of that choice. For most of the time period since the 90s, games were still growing in volume, and the increase in costs could be covered by an increase in volume. The inflation during much of that time period was irrelevant because of this. You can't just pick an arbitrary date in the 90s and calculate inflation since then.
That said, at this point, video games have likely found the size of the market they are likely to find. On that basis, I would concede there is a place for costs to rise with inflation from here on out. But I would also say that we don't need video games to be these giant, expensive open worlds with mediocre game play. While I haven't sworn off AAA entirely (I'm currently finishing up my first run through of Cyberpunk 2077), tight indie games have been the bulk of my enjoyment for a long time now.
Yeah the inflation argument doesn't hold water for this since as others have mentioned, proces were largely based off of physical media distribution, but also the fact that many cartridge based systems relied on the cartridges themselves to supply vital parts of hardware, like with the SNES having carts that added extra sound capabilities
I dont think this really holds water either as those cartridges couldnt have cost more than a few dollars to make, and while things aren't distributed physically as much anymore, there are still costs associated with distributing games digitally too.
They were fairly substantial.
Consider the SHVC-BA3M-10, which is the PCB used for Super Metroid. Some of what's on there are commodity parts, such as the MS6264CLL (an 8k SRAM chip).
Hard to track down exact prices from 1994, but we can get close. A Jaemco catalog from 1994 lists a series of SRAM chips on page 15. Per the datasheet above, we're looking for regular (not fast) SRAM in an 8x8k configuration. Those are listed in the neighborhood of $4 each, though bulk pricing would reduce that.
Doesn't sound like much? Consider that a good rule of thumb for pricing hardware is 2.5x cost of goods sold. So even if we assume $4 becomes $3 in bulk, we're still looking at $7.50 added to the retail cost. That's for just one chip, and it's probably not the most expensive one on there.
So jump ahead a bit. In 2004 disks were in use, but $60 then is $102.90 now.
Yeah but i got the whole game back then publishers increase the price already invisibly with DLC, cosmetics, Battlepasses. micro transactions, etc. Now they want both sell you half a game at an inflated price in comparison to the avg consumer wage and paywall the other half with casino style tactics.
Oh look. Physical distribution.
It's the inflation of everything else that contributes to this frustration. Food prices have risen over the same period at higher rates.
This is definitely a controversial take, but maybe there's some truth to it. (A price hike like $90 Mario Kart is way too much however). I think the issue here is that purchasing power has decreased for the majority of people over the last few years as inflation has increased whilst wages have not kept pace. And it really doesn't help when triple A games increase their prices whilst releasing in a buggy state - people don't see any benefit of a $10 increase to that game when it doesn't offer $10 more value than it would have done a year prior.
Sure, corporations need to recoup the high cost of development - but then perhaps their costs wouldn't be nearly as high if they didn't pay millions to their CEOs. Indie devs can successfully put out (usually much more interesting and creative) games for a fraction of the cost.
Fair, but cartridges cost real money to produce. Disks cost pennies. Publishers used to do much cheaper "collection edition" when a popular game was reprinted after the initial run, but that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.
Digital distribution is free, but there are frequent sales at least (except Nintendo)
Yeah funny how economies of scale is not longer a factor in price either ;)
The game you go in the 90s had more content then nowadays and didn't get completed with 3-5 €20 dlcs.
Older games did have less content.
But that's not a bad thing. It just meant they usually weren't filled with dozens of hours of busywork, grind, and pointless padding.