Video game prices have drastically risen since 2020. An article from Northern Global News states that “Development costs, increased budget, and new industry models have caused prices to increase.” Also, the data “compounding the price rise as statistics” from Video Game Insights, states “Concord, Payday 3, and Modern Warfare II failed to break even in their budgets” compared to all overall revenue generated in their release timeline. Many of us gamers feel as though they aren’t getting the quality gaming experience expected with the premium prices of newer games. In my opinion, I don’t believe the high pricing of new games is justified considering smaller games recently being praised for affordability and having good quality to back it up.
To add on, these new price hikes caused many gamers like me to be frustrated as in general prices of basic necessities are rising. Raised prices have led to backlash and a decline in gaming sales from consumers. According to Games Industry Biz, 18-24 year-olds’ weekly spending on games has dropped to 25%. The affordability of video games is harder on young people trying to manage games with financials and student loans as well.
In addition, due to high prices the gaming industry has had massive layoffs within recent years, as reported in the GameSpot’s report. Both Xbox and PlayStation have had massive layoffs, which negatively impacted the gaming studios’ merger between the two companies. This caused issues for game directors, and developers among other roles. Also, Quality Assurance, which are game testers typically called QAs without these workers, can cause pricing to go up to make up for the loss of people working on a given project.
As prices of video games continue to rise each year, overall it’s making it hard for new people to get into video games while also pushing the core audience away. Which is why me and other gamers stopped buying new games simply due to affordability. It’s not reasonable to buy one 70 dollar video game, just for the product’s quality not being worth its selling price.
Affordable pricing and the loss of focus on crucial aspects of a game, such as the gameplay and character dialogue are driving down consumer interest. However, two video games, Helldivers 2 and Palworld are successful examples of leaning into a big audience while still being affordable, showing the raising prices of video games is just to generate more revenue from game sales. These reasons are why I feel strongly against the justification of new premium pricing, which is supposed to show quality, but games with lower pricing still have better quality disproving high prices equals, you getting your money’s worth.
