It’s not supposed to be like this.
Until the current ninth console generation, video game hardware had a cyclical, predictable pattern. A new console came out at a semi-reasonable price, the early adopters jumped on it during the first year of sale, and over time, hardware prices would fall as console components became cheaper to make. Simultaneously, the game library naturally got bigger and better over the course of the generation, thus making that now-more-affordable system more appealing to more people, and therefore enabling console makers to sell the majority of hardware units in the back half of a console’s lifecycle. And then a new, more powerful console would be released, and the cycle would begin anew.
But no longer. Whether you want to blame political policy, the insatiable hunger of tech companies to push AI into our lives – thus necessitating one resource-hungry data center after another – pure greed by the capitalist companies that make our gaming devices, or some combination of the three, we now face a new, grim reality: gaming is no longer affordable, and instead of getting less expensive in the second half of the PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X generation, it is instead getting even pricier.
The downstream effect of this is a threat to the entire industry and the entire medium that we all love so dearly, because the simple fact of the matter is, if gaming never gets any cheaper and instead only ever gets more expensive, then there may not be a next generation of gamers able to get into the hobby. And with no next generation of players, the tent won’t grow and carry the industry forward.
If gaming never gets any cheaper and instead only ever gets more expensive, then there may not be a next generation of gamers able to get into the hobby.
Think about it this way: for many families, a kid asking their parents for a $600 console at any time of year, be it a birthday, holiday, or anything else, is a nonstarter compared to a $300 or $400 machine. But we could perhaps even excuse that in the past, because the answer would just be, “Wait for the price to drop.” Except, as we’ve seen this generation, that isn’t happening.
How did we get here? Microsoft hit gamers with two Xbox price increases last year, resulting in starting prices of $400 for the “more affordable” Xbox Series S and $600 for the Blu-ray drive-less Series X (the $500 launch Series X with an optical drive now runs $650).
Sony, meanwhile, has raised hardware prices twice as well – once last year, and it just did so again this week. The net result is that the PS5 starts at $600 (again, for the all-digital model; to get one with a Blu-ray drive that cost $500 at launch now rings up at $650), and now tops out at an eye-watering $900 for the more powerful PS5 Pro.
Nintendo is part of the problem here too. Remember last year when the company pushed back preorders of the just-announced Switch 2? We may never know if the Switch successor’s price went up during that deliberation, but we do know that the console we got is $450 (and I looked it up with an inflation calculator: the Switch 1’s $300 launch price equates to $400 in today’s money). And I’m not even going to get into the Big N’s software prices for this argument…
Oh, and don’t worry, PC hardware manufacturers – you’re guilty too! GPU prices are rising, while hard drive and RAM availability is scarce for the foreseeable future – which naturally sends prices skyward. No matter what screen you want to do your gaming on, it’s making your wallet even lighter and lighter to do so. Unless you’re playing on your phone.
Which brings me to my next question: Do game publishers and developers – and do we as gamers – really want the future of this medium to be Roblox on a smartphone, or whatever the next user-generated content machine is? While Roblox has its place in the ecosystem, I’m fairly certain that publishers don’t want it to become the only reliable way to bring in younger gamers, and I’m pretty sure players don’t either. I sure as hell don’t. It’s mostly user-created slop that, yes, can be valuable as a learning tool for future professional game developers, but it’s also not fit to be the default or standard in a world full of a wider array of unique games from a wider variety of studios and artists. But that’s the future we’re staring down if the rest of gaming prices most people out. Smartphones aren’t exactly cheap themselves, but they are viewed as necessities far more than gaming consoles are, and thus parents are far more likely to purchase them.
This isn’t to condemn mobile gaming as an inherently bad thing. But if mobile becomes the only place that an increasing number of players can access games, that might spell doom for the market that relies and thrives on consoles and PCs.
So what can we do about it? Well unfortunately, the burden of responsibility falls with the platform holders. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo need to find ways to make the cost of entry lower – not necessarily on day one, but eventually. Can Nintendo put together a Switch 2 Lite that shaves $100 off the price tag? Perhaps by shrinking the screen, removing the docking functionality that gives the device its name, and putting a smaller battery in it? That would go a long way towards getting more Nintendo Switch 2s into more people’s hands. It’d be a good place to start, at least.
As for Sony and Microsoft, it’s trickier, as they are working with more powerful (and thus more expensive) hardware. What might end up happening is that the overlap between generations gets even longer. Meaning, if you were annoyed by how long it took Sony to leave the PS4 behind and start letting its developers set the PS5 as the minimum spec, then you might really not like where we’re heading once the PS6 arrives. I can see a world where the PS5 essentially becomes the “more affordable” (there are those two words in quotes again!) PlayStation once the PS6 arrives, with most games supporting both the old and the new device for a majority of the generation. Same with Microsoft, who has already said that the next-gen Project Helix console/PC hybrid will be a “very premium, very high end” experience. Translation: it’s going to be expensive. That might mean that the Series X replaces the Series S as the entry point into the next Xbox generation, leaving Helix for the high-rollers.
I can see a world where the PS5 essentially becomes the “more affordable” PlayStation once the PS6 arrives, with most games supporting both the old and the new device for a majority of the generation.
If that’s the future we’re headed for in the console space, it’s likely going to mean that overall technical advancement happens more slowly as older hardware has to be supported by developers for years longer than they otherwise would. Maybe it will anyway, on account of both Moore’s Law and the ever-more-expensive pursuit of 4K/60fps photorealistic graphics causing development budgets and timelines alike to continue to balloon to historic highs. But even if that’s the case, it’d be less painful to arrive at that organically rather than higher console prices artificially pushing us to that point.
My point is that no matter how all of this shakes out, the present we are living through right now – with higher hardware prices that, crucially, do not decrease over the course of a console generation – is going to lead to a future that could be catastrophic for the video game industry and the medium of gaming as we know it. I’m not going to throw out any bombastic “You thought the video game crash in the Atari days was bad? Just you wait!” hot takes, because I don’t think we’re quite going to end up in a post-apocalyptic scenario where gaming is just gone, but I do think we’re heading for a future that none of us are going to like for this medium that we all love so dearly. I hope the console makers can look past the next quarter and see the potential long-term damage here before it’s too late.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
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