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?'”
