Has gaming outpriced the average player?

20 September, 2024

It’s an expensive time to be a gamer. Last week, Sony revealed that the mid-cycle upgrade for the PlayStation 5 (the PS5 Pro) will cost £300 more than the original – and won’t even include a disc drive. Over at Xbox, the popular Game Pass subscription service has locked more than 40 games and all future blockbuster releases behind its new top-tier plan. Add to that a similarly hefty increase to Sony’s online offering PS+, a steadily increasing RRP for new games and the FOMO-inducing pre-order bonuses that most titles now offer and your monthly gaming budget will start to seem pitifully meagre. Do not get us started on in-game microtransactions either.

So, what’s causing this sudden squeeze on gamers, who are the main culprits and is the industry at risk of pricing out anyone who’s not a millionaire?

Fans are getting squeezed by corporate greed

One big (and obvious reason) is inflation. Basically, everything gets more expensive over time, including the cost of making games. Therefore, the cost of buying them should go up too. But the gaming industry has reported massive earning increases for the past three years, including another record-breaking year in 2023. The need to jack-up prices obviously isn’t just coming from a place of necessity anymore.

“Inflation plays a part for sure, but I think gaming is also taking a lesson from the playbooks of streaming services: how much can you degrade a service and how much can you charge for it before people won’t pay for it anymore,” says journalist and co-founder of gaming publication Aftermath, Riley Macleod.

“All of this is in the service of shareholders and paying exorbitant CEO salaries,” he argues. The need to make more advanced games that only run on more powerful machines fuels what he calls “the endless growth dream” of tech. “We’re all getting squeezed into a situation that’s growing ever more impossible… For players, it sucks!”

Netflix-style subscriptions have taken over

Sam Naji is the creator of SJN Insights, a company that focuses on gaming data analysis, and believes that a lot of these conversations about cost have come about because of the divide between casual and hardcore gamers. “Video gaming today is expensive, but it has always been expensive,” he tells NME. Die-hard fans have never had much of an issue with this, “but ​once the console became part of the furniture, sitting under the TV in every household’s living room,” the conversation shifted, with more casual gamers wanting to get involved.

“Another problem is that we now live in a world where full-priced AAA gaming [blockbuster titles created by major studios with eye-watering budgets] is competing with a healthy indie gaming space that charges a lot less and free-to-play games [Fortnite, Apex Legends, Roblox, League Of Legends] where there is no price barrier to entry.”

Xbox Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass. Credit: Microsoft

It’s perhaps why Microsoft, who manufactures the Xbox, is pouring so much into Game Pass – as it looks to make its products accessible to as many people as possible. Over the past few years, the company has put billions into acquiring a number of different developers and studios including Activision Blizzard – who make the massively popular Call Of Duty series – to increase its offering and selling things like the digital-only Xbox Series S (which means you have to download your games over the internet and you’re only really buying a licence that could be revoked at any time).

“Microsoft could be overplaying its hand,” offers Naji, with the company also announcing a series of studio closures and a near-constant stream of lay-offs. “There is speculation that Game Pass subscriptions have stalled around the 35million accounts mark,” he adds, increasing the need to recoup some losses by bumping up the price of Game Pass. “It is still quite a good-value way to enjoy games, but at what point does the per month price increase to a point where it’s probably better value for a casual gamer to just buy a game every few months – and will that even be an option by the time the tipping point is reached,” asks gamer Jake Hawkes.

PlayStation is chasing the perfect-looking game

The PS5 Pro appears to have pissed off fans more than some of these other hikes. This is partly because they feel they’re not actually getting anything new for the extra cash. In fact, they think they’re getting less. The PS3 (released in 2006) may have had a similar price point when you account for inflation, but it at least came with a disc-drive, which meant you could play all (or nearly all) of your old games for free – and it also acted as a DVD and Blu-Ray player. The PS5 Pro doesn’t even come with a stand.

The PlayStation 5 Pro.
The PlayStation 5 Pro. CREDIT: Sony

Hawkes, like many gaming fans, dislikes the PS5 Pro because not only is it too expensive for the majority of people, but “it also actively harms an industry which is too often focussed on the wrong parts of gaming.”

“Sony have removed the disc drive for the PS5 Pro, making it impossible to get money back on used titles or lend games to friends, and focused on how it will make features like ray tracing [technology that simulates how light interacts with in-game objects to create more realistic images] better,” he explains. “Who really cares if a new game has 15 per cent more realistic lighting?”

He points to the Nintendo Switch, a console which is severely underpowered compared to the PlayStation, and gorgeous titles like The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. “I would genuinely love to see an industry which prioritises enjoyment and entertainment over fancy visuals and live service games which only exist to cynically create gameplay loops and extract more money from gamers.”

The future doesn’t look great

Conversations about the cost of gaming have been raging for decades now, but will this current crop of price rises finally start forcing people out of gaming for good?

Well, it’s not looking good. 30-year-old Katie, who’s been a gamer since she was a kid, is already having to second-guess every purchase she makes. “It was always a luxury, but it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to be a gamer,” she tells NME. “The second-hand market is pretty much non-existent now due to the rise of digital-only consoles, so if I’m going to buy a game, I need to know it’s going to be worth my time,” she says, which leads to a lot of research, debates with friends and some tough decisions as well as the occasional dose of buyer’s remorse. And gaming is supposed to be fun!

“Consoles aren’t getting cheaper either and while things like Game Pass sound like a really good deal, the costs soon add up for that as well,” she continues, now paying £180 a year for Game Pass Ultimate, which offers her absolutely no ownership over her favourite titles. “Looking at the cost of the PS5 Pro and how spenny everything else is getting, I’m worried my days as a gamer are numbered,” she admits. “

Recently, artists like Chrissy Costanza and mxmtoon spoke to NME about how important gaming is for self-discovery, self-expression and community while a new study proved that playing video games is good for you. “I think play is a fundamental part of the human condition – it’s one of the first things you do as a child, how you learn about the world and experiment with interacting with it,” says MacLeod. “I think it’s important that everyone is able to access and play games.

“I don’t think Microsoft or PlayStation are trying to forge some future where gaming is an elite hobby,” he adds, but we’ve already seen how that can accidentally happen with PC gaming and the race to create bigger and more impressive graphics cards, pricing out the casual gamer. “Making good games that people want to buy and also can afford to buy, that don’t cost more to make than they can possibly hope to sell, might sound like an obvious strategy for turning this around, but I think it would be a start.”

Or as one viral tweet put it, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.”

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