Video games are getting more expensive. The PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have seen significant price hikes, the Switch 2 is due for a $50 price increase in September, and seemingly overnight, $70 has become the normal asking price for most new releases.But for many, the gaming industry’s slide towards an all-digital future could be the final nail in the coffin.
For years, the secondhand games industry has represented a cheaper and more accessible way of getting into the hobby. But PlayStation’s pending elimination of physical games means that a used market and public library access of games will diminish for new releases after 2028. Microsoft’s mass of layoffs, studio sales, and project cancellations further indicate the direction the mainstream industry is headed: Fewer games at more premium prices for a wealthier clientele. There are a lot of forces to blame for this: the industry still realigning after the transformative boom-and-bust of COVID, the escalation of AI infrastructure making every aspect of computing pricey, tariffs making shipping anything to-and-from the United States prohibitively expensive. But all of this adds up to an onslaught that pushes poorer people out of the hobby.
For this report, we spoke to gamers of all stripes. Some are professional content creators and journalists, while others are avid hobbyists and side-hustlers. They all shared a central problem: Rising costs have prevented them from upgrading their gear or playing the video games they want to play. This is not a comprehensive study, but it does offer a picture into what decisions and pressures players are feeling.
Chris Edgerton is a freelance games writer, specializing in sports games and accessibility coverage. Since getting laid off from his regular freelance contract, his primary income is from SSDI payments. In our conversation over Discord, he emphasized, “We’ve been pushed into a space where no matter what, people are going to start thinking about games as a high-end luxury, right? Having a gaming device isn’t like having a car–it’s like having a nice car.”
Though video games are primarily a hobby for Edgerton, for years he has supplemented it with freelance writing, often justifying the cost of new games through the possibility of making that money back with a tidy profit.
For journalists and critics like Edgerton, the rising costs of games results in loss of income, which further backslides into being unable to buy games. “Now I have to wait for sales on everything,” Edgerton told us.
Ashley Schofield, freelance critic and author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works, primarily games and reviews work on PC, but her computer’s aging parts have made that more difficult. She told us over email that identifying technical issues with games is becoming more difficult.
” [I have] to try to figure out ‘Okay, is this genuinely an optimization problem with the game, or a case of it being CPU-intensive and that being, in a sense, on me?'”
But upgrading her machine has proven fraught. Shofield lucked out on a graphics card from her brother, who sold it to her at a reduced price, but further upgrades to her rig are still far out of sight. “A better CPU is something I’d like to have, but struggle to justify. Same with the RAM, but to an obviously ridiculous degree,” she said.
Changing costs has yet to affect her ability to accept work, but she suspects that will soon change. “I haven’t yet had to choose not to pitch [or] turn down a review due to being sure I won’t be able to reasonably run it … but I think it’ll happen within a year if nothing changes.” Schofield’s fear indicates another reality of these cost increases. While fewer and fewer gamers are able to afford new hardware, new games continue to demand more intensive machines.
These same issues affect gamers with less professional investment in the hobby. Rodrigo is a lifelong gamer, but struggles to keep up with current releases. Over Discord call, he told us that he’s always been “a generation behind” current consoles. Right now, Rodrigo mostly plays on a laptop he got six years ago. Though his computer has struggled with many new releases, like Marathon, he hasn’t been able to upgrade the system for years because of financial struggles.
“Every single time that I’ve ever given serious consideration to upgrading… something ends up happening that ends up eating into my savings,” Rodrigo said. ““I have really been committed to squeezing every last bit of juice out [my current PC].”
It’s easy to compare this with prior generations, where the cost of consoles and associated technologies would decline over time. “At one point, it was a big deal that the PS2 was $99.That’s an entry point. That’s as low as these things are gonna get. And we’re never gonna get the PS5 down to even $199. That’s never gonna happen,” Edgerton said. In fact, PS5 prices rose twice in the past year. A future where the PS5 drops even below $500 feels distant.
This is a contrast to most video game console cycles in recent memory. The PS3 and PS4, as well as the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, all got cheaper versions partway through their time on the market. Another gamer, Ty J., told us over Bluesky DMs, “When the PS5 got announced, I was in college and I thought, ‘By the time I graduate and get a job, they’ll have a PS5 Slim for $299.’ Unfortunately, we live in the bad timeline, so not only am I still unemployed; the PS5 got more expensive.”
Even for people who have relatively up-to-date rigs, storage has become an increasing problem. Kyrie Page is an editor at indie website Scanline Media, which primarily produces podcasts and streams. She vented in an email, “The HDD cost has been the most frustrating. I wanted to build an NAS [network-attached storage] to hold things like streams [and] podcasts in one spot, and for a time that was very feasible. HDD prices were cheap and it wasn’t that hard to get a 12TB drive that you’d set and forget. But the data-center demands have vastly inflated the cost.” The increased expenses make it hard for streamers and Let’s Play creators to get started, or even keep back-ups of their own material.
Outside of the AAA space, there are a breadth of alternative gaming cultures making retro-styled or otherwise low-intensive games which can run on any machine imaginable. “Friendslop” games like Peak or Lethal Company offer cheap, lo-fi thrills for entire groups of people. Rodrigo emphasized that not being able to access the cutting edge can lead to getting to more interesting places than new releases.
“It does broaden the scope in terms of what you can engage with,” he told us. “If you have the right mindset towards that, there’s plenty of things that you can try and get a feel for that maybe you wouldn’t have readily considered otherwise.”
But if TikTok and Fortnite are major threats to the console space as it stands, those forces are even more brutal to the little guys. The fact is, homegrown games largely cannot be as honed and compulsive as Roblox or Candy Crush. This is a feature, not a bug, but it does mean that they cannot hold the cultural sway that those free-to-play games can. With a low barrier of entry–and plenty of ways they can financially prey on lower-income gamers–these titles are more likely to capture new audiences than anything else.
“My hope is that all this stuff eventually cools down,” Edgerton told me. “Either the AI bubble pops … Or the tariffs come down because Trump moves out of office and whoever takes over [wants] a bunch of political credit for [being] like, ‘Oh, I just made all these electronics so much cheaper because I did this.'”
While these hopes are not implausible, it is hard to predict what will really happen. Rodrigo was more pessimistic. He told us that, “We are now in an era where we are facing diminishing returns in terms of technological advancement, and it has done absolutely nothing to actually open up the playing field [so we can return to] a more accessible environment.”
What feels certain, at least in the short term, is that games will continue to become more expensive. Video games consoles have always been a luxury item, but they have also served multiple purposes. The PS2, for example, was a way to get both a DVD player and a console. Additionally, its cheapness and ubiquity gave it sway in countries without a stable video game market. Both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X are backwards compatible with prior generations, letting people import their physical and digital games into the future. Nintendo consoles have long been favorites of libraries, community centers, and retirement homes, often acting as ways to expand their event programming.
What these all share in common though is that they are marginal use-cases. Nintendo does not design its machines for community centers, but for families of individual gamers. Backwards compatibility has always been intended to move unit sales, not to preserve gaming history. However, in their margins, all these things allow games to become a stranger, more expansive, and more welcoming space. The fewer people get to access games, the fewer people will be able to shape gaming culture. These margins still exist. But, at least for now, they are getting smaller.
