“The Return of the $70 Video Game Has Been a Long Time Coming: Top-End Game Pricing Has Never Been Lower When Measured in Constant Dollars”, 2020-07-09 (; backlinks):
Last week, 2K made waves by becoming the first publisher to set a $70 asking price for a big-budget game on the next generation of consoles. NBA2K21 will cost the now-standard $60 on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but 2K will ask $10 more for the upcoming Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of the game (a $100 “Mamba Forever Edition” gives players access to current-generation and next-generation versions in a single bundle).
It remains to be seen if other publishers will follow 2K’s lead and make $70 a new de facto standard for big-budget console game pricing. But while $70 would match the high-water mark for nominal game pricing, it wouldn’t be a historically high asking price in terms of actual value. Thanks to inflation and changes in game distribution, in fact, the current ceiling for game prices has never been lower.
…To measure how the actual asking price for console games has changed over time, we relied primarily on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers we found online. While this information was easier to find for some years than others, we were still able to gather data for 20 distinct years across the last four decades. We then adjusted those nominal prices to constant 2020 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI inflation calculator.
…While nominal cartridge game prices in the early ’80s topped out at $30 to $40, inflation makes that the equivalent of $80 to $100 per game these days. $34.99 for Centipede on the Atari 2600 might sound cheap, but that 1983 price is the equivalent of roughly $90 today…As the industry transitioned into 16-bit cartridges in the ’90s, though, nominal prices for top-end games rose quickly past $60 in nominal dollars and $110 in 2020 dollars. That’s in large part because of the expensive ROM storage and co-processors often included in games of the day. By 1997, late-era SNES and early-era N64 games were routinely selling for $69.99 at many retailers, the highest nominal prices the industry has generally seen and still the equivalent of over $110 in today’s dollars.
…Disc prices settled down to a more reasonable $49.99 soon after that, setting a functional nominal price ceiling that would remain until the mid ’00s. It wasn’t until the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hit the scene that top asking prices started increasing to $59.99. And that’s the de facto ceiling that has remained in place to this day, even as digital downloads and the explosion of indie games has meant many titles now launch at well below this price.
Adjusting for inflation, we can see the actual (2020 dollar) value of top-end disc-based games plateaued right around $70 for almost a decade through in the ’00s and early ’10s. Inflation has slowly eroded that value in the last decade, though, to the point where a $10 increase like the one for NBA2K21 merely gets games to the same actual price point as they enjoyed earlier in the century…a bump to $70 would not be a historically unprecedented increase in console gaming’s price ceiling. Accounting for inflation, in fact, it would merely bring those prices back in line with the recent historical average—something to keep in mind as you prepare for a new, seemingly costlier generation of console hardware.