Well, Videogames Cost $80 Now I Guess

By Elijah Gonzalez | April 11, 2025 | 10:58am

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Last week, Nintendo finally held its long-awaited Switch 2 live stream, which fully unveiled the system by showcasing its hardware, features, and launch lineup. There were Metroids, there were Donkey Kongs, and while a lot of the show’s runtime was dedicated to ports of games we can already play, there was just enough new material to fill out the hour-long event.

However, the biggest surprise was what was absent: anything around pricing. Likely conscious of a potentially negative reaction, Nintendo silently announced its console’s $449.99 price point in a written press release after the show. Needless to say, when this news finally hit, it was not received well. The chat feed on Nintendo’s subsequent streams was taken over by comments like “DROP THE PRICE.” Considering that the original Switch launched at $300 back in 2017, it was a steep increase from a company that’s typically marketed its systems as the much cheaper alternative to Sony and Microsoft’s more powerful hardware—for context, the PS5 and Xbox One X launched at $500. The Switch 2 undeniably costs a significant chunk of change, and given the current climate of economic uncertainty, it makes sense why so many are peeved.

However, on top of the Switch 2 pricing controversy, Nintendo also had another stealthy price hike, which will arguably have a bigger ripple effect on the game industry writ large. They’re charging $80 for certain games now. We also found this out in a roundabout way, in this case, via Mario Kart World’s listing on Nintendo’s website. Even more flagrant is they also revealed that some Switch 1 games are being re-released on the new system for $80, including Kirby and The Forgotten Land, Super Mario Party Jamboree, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. You can upgrade for $10 if you already have the previous game, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that they plan on charging this hefty amount for re-releases, too. While the company has said that these price points will change on a game-by-game basis— the recently announced Donkey Kong Bananza will cost $70—we can probably assume many of their biggest titles, like the next mainline Legend of Zelda, will go for $80. As for why Nintendo upped Mario Kart World’s price, Nintendo’s Bill Trinen said in an interview with IGN, “I would say it’s less about the strategy of pricing Mario Kart World, it’s more just whenever we look at a given game, we just look at what is the experience, and what’s the content, and what’s the value?”

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Over just a few years, the maximum generally charged for a game has jumped from $60 to $70 to potentially $80. After the Xbox 360 era brought this number from $50 to $60 in 2005, games maintained that soft cap until around 2020, when NBA2K21 charged $70. Since then, pricing has been sporadic, with some companies charging $70 for big-budget games while others still charge $60. And now, just a few years later, a new high-point has been set, which will likely be matched by at least a few publishers besides Nintendo.

Now, obviously, the existence of inflation means that game prices probably couldn’t have feasibly remained at $60 forever. In fact, $60 in 2005 had the same buying power as $97.10 does today, meaning that on paper, game prices haven’t kept close to matching the pace of inflation. If you look back further to the ‘70s and ‘80s, these numbers can be even more extreme, with a $40 Atari 2600 game being the equivalent of $208.34 today. On top of this, game budgets have ballooned in recent years, with releases like Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 allegedly costing around $300 million, a three-times increase from the previous entry in the series, further straining the feasibility of old price points.

However, what these metrics don’t consider is that, at least in the US, wage growth has been largely stagnant over the last few decades. Meanwhile, the percentage of income that Americans spend on core costs like housing, healthcare, food, and education has soared, leaving less room for everything non-essential, like, you know, videogames. To put it into numbers, as Helaine Olen wrote in her book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, “housing, health care, and education cost the average family 75 percent of their discretionary income in the 2000s. The comparable figure in 1973: 50 percent.” That book was published over nine years ago, and since then, we’ve gone through a global pandemic and supply chain meltdown that inflated the cost of basic goods as wages have struggled to keep up.

On top of this, while inflation-adjusted game prices were lower over the last two console generations than during many periods in the medium’s history, publishers now frequently charge microtransactions and subscriptions, meaning many are paying more than the initial buy-in. Skins, DLC, battle passes, loot boxes, and more have become commonplace, so much so that it’s surprising when a AAA title doesn’t have at least one of them. And while Nintendo generally avoids these trends, that doesn’t change the fact that their 14% percent increase on their high-end output comes with a great deal of finality: their first-party games rarely go on sale, if ever, meaning you can’t outlast that $80 price point with patience.

Many have lept to this large corporation’s defense with the justification that this increase is happening to offset the rising cost of game development. In response, I have a radical suggestion. Hey, maybe game budgets should be smaller. While these long, expensive dev cycles allow for more realistic graphics, those elements have reached a point of diminishing returns. For example, even though there’s more “content,” it doesn’t quite seem sensible that Spider-Man 2’s budget was triple the previous games’.

When combined with the increasing cost of essentials and other economic factors, the impact of this price shift will likely be a predictable one: even more so than before, certain groups of people will be priced out of premium games. Sure, there are plenty of F2P experiences out there as well as cheaper, frankly frequently more interesting games at lower price points (i.e., Hollow Knight is $15 on Steam), but it’s unfortunate that this hobby is going the way of everything else, towards increasing stratification and inaccessibility. It’s even more depressing that Nintendo is leading the charge, given the generally broad appeal of their output and the fact their releases are frequently among the best bigger-budget games out there.

With the Switch 2, Nintendo is following up on one of the most successful consoles of all time. In fact, having recently passed 150 million units sold, it’s only 10 million behind the PS2, which is the current highest-selling system. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the Switch also had several of Nintendo’s most popular first-party games ever, with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe moving 67 million copies, Animal Crossing: New Horizons at 47 million, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate at 35 million, and so on. Case in point, they’re seemingly in a strong position.

But over the years, we’ve seen a familiar pattern where after an ultra-successful console generation, the company on top of the pile grows overconfident and then proceeds to positively beef it. Following the PS2, PlayStation head Ken Kutaragi implied that consumers would have to work extra hours to afford the PS3 before revealing its brutal $600 tag. When Microsoft’s Xbox 360 dominated in the US, they followed it up with the underperforming Xbox One. After the Nintendo Wii came the Wii U, and so on.

While I won’t make any predictions about the fate of the Switch 2 given how successful its predecessor was, honestly, it’s already left a sour taste in my mouth. Maybe I could eventually stomach the console’s price if it doesn’t go up further due to tariffs and if the system ends up having hardware firepower for a handheld (although they still probably should have created an alternate cheaper version). But the thought of periodically coughing up $80 for the latest Nintendo games is much harder to stomach. While console prices rise and fall from gen to gen, game costs have been a Pandora’s box for the last 20 years: once they go up, they rarely go back down. After creating a system that dominated thanks to its broad appeal, Nintendo likely just made the game industry a whole lot less accommodating.

Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.