Why have videogames become so expensive, and will they get even more expensive?

Since its announcement, the price of this "game of the generation" has worried us just as much as the size of Vice City's map, the names of the protagonists, or the release date. Because the question "How much should we pay for games?" affects everyone — from a schoolkid saving up by skipping lunch to a corporate CEO sitting in an office atop a skyscraper.

In this article, I will explore how video game prices have changed, explain why they are simultaneously getting more expensive and cheaper, break down how game prices are determined, and where budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars come from. Finally, I will try to predict what lies ahead and how an $80 GTA will impact the gaming industry.

If you think game prices have risen like in the chart above, I am here to surprise you: they have fluctuated significantly depending on the platform, have repeatedly approached the coveted $70 mark, and... have never been cheap. In 1982, the simulator B-17 Bomber for Intellivision cost $40 (the same price as ARC Raiders and Helldivers 2 today). The standard price for 8-bit Nintendo hits like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda was $50. On 16-bit SNES and Sega Mega Drive, certain titles, driven by hype (Final Fantasy 3, Street Fighter 2), could reach $70.

At the same time, the price gap between platforms was enormous. Major games for the Nintendo 64 in the late 1990s cost an astronomical $60–80, while new releases for the PlayStation typically went for $40–50. This difference was partly due to the high production cost of cartridges compared to discs.

However, direct price comparisons are misleading because the dollar in 1982, or even in 2013, had significantly greater purchasing power than it does today. If you account for inflation, the $50 for the original The Legend of Zelda in 1986 would be roughly $150 today. So, for the end consumer, games are actually cheaper now than they used to be.

For clarity, here's a comparison of GTA series prices adjusted for inflation.

A similar picture emerges when comparing salaries. GTA: Vice City at $50 was about 1.9% of the median monthly salary in the US in 2002, or roughly 3 hours and 15 minutes of work. GTA 6 at $80 is 1.5%, or about two and a half hours of work in 2026. In Russia, by the way, to enjoy the sixth "Grand Theft Auto," you would need to spend more than two days in the office or at the factory.

If Super Mario 64 cost $60 in 1996, why all the fuss about GTA 6 at $80 in 2026? Why does this price scare some, while Yves Guillemot pops the champagne?

By the early 2000s, a unified price standard for major releases had emerged in the gaming industry — $49.99. This situation largely persists today. The price of AAA projects serves as the upper benchmark, with the cost of other titles depending on their scale, budget, length, and commercial ambitions. If blockbusters sell for $69.99, mid-tier projects cost $39.99–59.99, smaller games go for $10–30, and so on. Consequently, price serves not only an economic function but also a symbolic one: even before release, it tells the buyer which category the publisher places the game in and what level of quality and scope to expect.

In the late 2000s, with the rise of digital distribution, the AAA bar rose to $59.99 and held steady for over 15 years. The first warning of a new price hike was NBA 2K21 for PS5 and Xbox Series at $69.99 from publisher Take-Two Interactive (which, coincidentally, owns Rockstar and is behind the $80 GTA 6). However, the $70 standard only firmly established itself by 2023.

And now we stand on the brink of another price jump. GTA 6 is far from the first here. Nintendo already crossed this threshold in 2025 with Mario Kart World at $79.99 (Related: 43 Best Nintendo Switch 2 Games).

However, it is GTA 6 that has the power to turn $80 into the new norm due to its significance and status. If consumers calmly accept the new price, and all signs point to that being the case, other publishers will get the perfect justification for raising prices. Initially, $80 will likely apply mainly to the biggest releases — new installments of Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, The Elder Scrolls, major PlayStation exclusives, and so on. Afterwards, the new bar will pull up prices for other categories. That's how the market works: a price increase for the flagship product leads to a shift in the entire pricing ladder. Against the backdrop of $80 for an AAA project, $30 for an indie game for a couple of evenings won't seem like such a steep overpay.

Especially since, for years now, we've been hearing from every corporate boss how much more expensive development has become.

Development costs have indeed increased hundreds or even thousands of times over. Budgets have grown so large that some significantly exceed $300 million. The growth is most noticeable in the AAA segment, especially over the last 10–15 years. Comparing to projects from the 80s and early 90s is pointless — the budget for DOOM was basically just pizza boxes and Coke bottles. But, for instance, the first true blockbuster Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 cost Square Enix $85 million, while GTA 6, by the most modest estimates, cost over $1 billion.

Where do these colossal figures come from? 30 to 60% of a major game's budget goes to salaries. Super Mario was made by eight people over nine months, using such a revolutionary prototyping technology as drawing on paper.

Modern blockbusters are so large-scale, and technologies so labor-intensive and complex, that they require the work of hundreds or even thousands of specialists over three to seven years. The Witcher 3 — 240 people and 3.5 years. The Last of Us Part 2 — 200 employees and nearly six years. GTA 6 — over two thousand people and eight years.

And that's not counting thousands of freelance specialists — from regular freelancers to actors and musicians. For instance, the voice acting for Red Dead Redemption 2 involved about 1200 professional actors. Behind every animation, character, splatter of yellow paint on an obstacle, line of script (over 1.3 million in Baldur's Gate 3), or horse testicles shrinking in the cold, there are specific people and entire teams. In 2022, Activision Blizzard employed over 1,100 QA testers alone.

Most major studios are based in high-salary countries (the US, Japan, Western Europe), and earnings in the gaming industry are well above average. According to a GDC study, in 2025, the average salary in the US game industry was $142,000 per year, compared to the national average of $64,000. Simple math: with a staff of 200 and a six-year development cycle, a studio would spend $170 million on salaries alone.

The second major expense for any AAA game is marketing and promotion: 25 to 40% of the budget goes here. Due to high competition in the blockbuster segment, making a good game isn't enough to succeed — it needs to be turned into an event. Publishers spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on trailers, outdoor advertising, presentations, influencer marketing, and more.

A telling example is Cyberpunk 2077 with a budget of $316 million — 45%, about $142 million, was spent on marketing and communications. The campaign covered 55 countries, materials were prepared in 34 languages, and in November and December 2020 alone, they generated over 3 billion impressions.

Finally, tens of millions of dollars more go to ancillary expenses: office rent and maintenance, equipment purchases, engine royalties, software licenses, server infrastructure, and other technical needs. Modern games require huge investments not only in developer salaries but also in specialized infrastructure. To make Leon Kennedy's biceps admirably realistic and zombie groans terrifying, Capcom built an entire production complex with 3D scanners and motion capture studios. For Oscar-worthy cutscenes, Sony opened its own mocap studio in California for Naughty Dog and Santa Monica.

The logical question is: how do Rockstar and other publishers manage to recoup such expensive projects when game prices have barely risen in that time, and have even gotten cheaper when adjusted for inflation?

The reason lies in the radical transformation of the video game market over the past 20 years.

First, the audience size has grown exponentially. Whereas the market was once tens of millions of consumers, in 2025, according to Newzoo data, the console audience reached 645 million people, PC — 936 million, and mobile — around 3 billion players. As a result, huge budgets are recouped not through high margins, but through sales volume — even a small profit per copy turns into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Second, the standard price has long ceased to reflect the actual amount a publisher receives from a single user. To the base cost have been added DLC, season passes, in-game purchases, cosmetics, Deluxe editions, and so on. Publishers are consciously betting on a service model and "whales" (a term from the gambling industry). This refers to a small portion of the audience willing to regularly spend large sums in games. While most players may pay little or nothing, the spending of this most active group compensates for the low monetization of the rest.

A good example is GTA 6's monetization model. Despite pre-orders already being live, we haven't been shown a second of gameplay, yet we've been told in detail how the Ultimate Edition is "better" than the standard. This all points to Rockstar marketers' goal being to sell the more expensive version. The next element of extracting additional profit will be GTA Online for the sixth installment, which apparently will be sold separately. And just like that, $80 becomes $120–140, and then there's the in-game store, access to unique missions, and so on. For Rockstar, such a service-based monetization model is a well-practiced mechanism: at its peak, GTA Online brought in over $700 million a year.

Third, digital distribution has reduced costs. The economics of physical copies are as follows: 25–30% is the retailer's share, about 15% is platform holder licensing fees, 5% is production and logistics, plus there may be additional costs from returns of unsold copies. So, the publisher gets at best 50% of the disc or cartridge's market price.

Digital copies cost next to nothing; the only additional expense is the digital storefront commission (15 to 30%), but the publisher pays this only for each game actually sold.

Game industry analyst Serkan Toto cites the following figures:

Now you understand why GTA 6 boxes contain download codes, and why Sony abandoned discs despite huge reputational damage? (Related: The End of Game Ownership? Why PlayStation Is Abandoning Discs.)

Fourth, thanks to digital distribution, the sales tail has lengthened significantly. Previously, most revenue came in the first few weeks after release. Afterwards, profit was generated by rental and secondary sales markets. The most a publisher could hope for was a special Game of the Year Edition, usually at a lower price.

In the digital age, projects can generate profit for years. In the last fiscal year, Devil May Cry 5 set an annual sales record of 2.7 million copies, seven years after its release. All thanks to the success of the Netflix animated series.

The main sales driver is discounts and sales. They not only increase the appeal of a purchase but have become a crucial element of gamer culture and consumer behavior. According to a Censuswide survey, one in four American gamers prefers to wait for a sale before buying a game, while only 17% are willing to pay full price for a new release.

A price drop doesn't necessarily mean a drop in profit. As explained by Capcom head Kenzo Tsujimoto, development costs for projects are recouped within the first year and are fully amortized over time, so even sales at deep discounts are extremely profitable for the company.

Yes and no. To understand, we need to delve a bit into the pricing principles of video games.

The first surprise is that the budget size does not determine the price of a specific game. Rather, the price at which the publisher plans to sell the game determines its future budget. Former Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games, Sergiy Galyonkin, explains this paradox:

In other words, the publisher first estimates at what price the game can be sold and how many buyers it can attract, then calculates the projected revenue, and only then determines the allowable budget. A game costs $70 not because $200 million was spent making it. Rather, the publisher spends $200 million because it expects to sell enough copies at $70 to achieve the desired profit.

But why, to sell a game for $70, does the publisher have to invest hundreds of millions in it?

Because the price of a specific game is determined by its status and positioning. Simplifying greatly, the price of video games is a consequence of an unspoken market consensus between publishers and buyers. The former seek to maximize profits; consumers, on the other hand, want to pay a "fair" price for games, which depends on objective factors like their salary and the cost of competing entertainment, as well as purely subjective notions of how much "this game" should cost.

The reality of the modern game market is that the maximum price of $70 is considered "fair" for game blockbusters. This makes the AAA segment the most attractive for publishers, as blockbusters allow combining the maximum price with the widest possible reach.

On one hand, blockbusters are often part of popular franchises and are created by well-known studios, which, combined with large marketing budgets, allows them to attract mass audience and press attention even before release.

On the other hand, to match the status of a blockbuster, enormous investments are needed. Realistic graphics, cinematic presentation, famous actors, professional voice acting, and an abundance of game mechanics require the work of hundreds of specialists over several years. Furthermore, the project must cater to different groups of players: offering diverse characters (e.g., women often prefer playing as female protagonists), flexible difficulty and accessibility settings, side activities, and mechanics designed for audiences with varying preferences.

The high budget is both a condition for producing a blockbuster and part of its consumer image. To justify the maximum price tag, the publisher must show the audience the scale of investment and convince them that this is indeed a premium-level product.

That's why AAA advertising constantly lists markers of scale — the number of dialogue lines, NPCs, planets, and so on. And why videos comparing graphics realism and detail fidelity are so popular among gamers.

For the same reason, a significant portion of the audience criticizes the high price of Nintendo exclusives, because they don't look or feel like games for which it's "fair" to demand full price.

It is precisely the gaming industry's focus on blockbusters that has become the main reason for the explosive growth of budgets and subsequent price increases. Inflation, technological development, and production complexity also played a role, but the key factor was the publishers' drive for super-profits.

Since the early 2000s, as the audience rapidly expanded, the gaming industry entered an era of super-profits. More and more projects began to appear whose profitability was measured in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. In 2004, Halo 2 generated $125 million in its first day of sales, and Halo 3 earned over $300 million in its first week. In 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 raked in about $550 million in five days.

At the same time, the revenue gap between blockbusters and mid-budget projects grew. This is largely due to the consumer behavior of the mass audience — most people buy only a few new titles a year. According to Circana, 63% of American gamers buy no more than two new games a year. A blockbuster has a much higher chance of being among them — thanks to a larger marketing budget, studio reputation, and press attention.

The potential profitability of blockbusters far exceeded that of mid-budget projects. The resounding success of individual AAA games repeatedly confirmed the validity of this strategy. GTA 5 brought in over $1 billion in just three days, and Red Dead Redemption 2 — over $725 million in its opening weekend. Back in 2014, in its annual report, Electronic Arts noted that sales were increasingly concentrating around the most popular games, explaining its decision to release fewer projects and channel main resources into the most promising franchises.

As a result, many major publishers almost entirely switched to a blockbuster model. Former Valve engineer Jeri Ellsworth mentioned that Gabe's company adheres to the "zero billion dollars" principle — management won't even consider projects that could bring in "mere millions" in profit. In 2026, Microsoft carried out massive layoffs, got rid of some studios, and cut less priority areas to focus resources on just a few series — Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein. Former head of PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, said that at Sony it's practically impossible to get approval for mid-scale projects. According to him, the familiar AA segment has practically disappeared, which was one of the reasons for disbanding Japan Studio.

The concentration of resources from the largest studios into the super-profitable AAA segment spawned a budget arms race. To maintain the status of the year's main release and not get lost among competitors, each new game had to look larger, more technologically advanced, and more spectacular than the previous one, and its marketing campaign had to be even louder. Combined with inflation, increasing graphics demands, and the emergence of ever more powerful hardware, this led to a natural rise in development costs.

This is well illustrated by Rockstar's projects. The development of GTA 3 cost about $5 million, the budget for San Andreas is estimated at $10–15 million, GTA 4 — about $100 million, and the total costs for creating and promoting GTA 5 — about $265 million. The exact budgets for Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6 are not disclosed, but we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the case of GTA 6, billions.

However, along with budgets, the cost of failure also grew. If a publisher's financial well-being depends on a few super-expensive projects, the failure of even one can lead to huge losses, mass layoffs, and studio closures. Paradoxically, the only way to compensate for losses is to create even more large-scale and expensive games, because only their super-profits can cover losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. Therefore, Sony, for example, after the failure of Concord, stated that it would continue to invest in large-scale games-as-a-service.

Simultaneously, the fear of failure forced publishers to reduce risks — choosing not new IPs or experimental projects, but well-known franchises, proven genres, mechanics, and solutions aimed at the broadest possible audience. This is why we see so many remakes or open-world games. (Related: Halo: Campaign Evolved is coming to the PS5. What can we expect from this Unreal Engine 5 remaster?).

In the end, the modern gaming industry finds itself trapped in a kind of closed cycle of budget growth. To continue generating super-profits, publishers must release blockbusters. However, high competition in the AAA segment forces them to invest more and more in their production each time. Rising costs and failures of individual projects mean that each subsequent blockbuster must bring in even more profit, and therefore, even more must be invested in its production and marketing. And just when it seems this race should stop, another megahit like GTA 5 comes out, and its success triggers a new round of the race.

In such conditions, price increases are almost inevitable. If publishers fail to push through a price increase for base editions, even more effort will be directed at additional monetization: expensive editions, early access, story DLC, cosmetic items, battle passes, and microtransactions. The question is no longer whether games will get more expensive, but rather how exactly publishers will force audiences to pay more.

In 2019, no one could have predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would lock billions of people at home, giving the gaming industry a sharp boost in audience and sales. Likewise, it's unlikely anyone foresaw that the development of neural networks would lead to semiconductor shortages and a memory crisis, thereby delaying the next console generation by several years. So any predictions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism: we don't know what black and white swans the coming years will bring to the gaming industry.

However, focusing on how the release of GTA 6 will affect prices and the industry as a whole, three scenarios seem most likely.

GTA 6 becomes a megahit, and most buyers calmly accept the $80 price tag. Rockstar's project attracts tens of millions of new players, some of whom integrate into the active gaming audience. Drawn by the scent of super-profits, investors flock in, ready to fund the next blockbusters.

Major publishers raise the price bar to $80 and increase budgets, trying to match the standard set by Rockstar. According to analyst Joost van Dreunen, this will increase the gap between the biggest blockbusters and other games. Alongside the growth in production and marketing costs, the financial burden on buyers also increases — publishers seek ever more sophisticated monetization methods and try their hardest to push through the next price increase.

The rising real cost of blockbusters, the increasing price of gaming hardware (with predictions suggesting the next console generation will cost over $1000), will lead to a significant stratification of the gaming audience. AAA games will gradually become entertainment for the wealthiest gamers, willing to regularly spend hundreds of dollars on hardware, games, subscriptions, and additional content. Other players will increasingly turn to indie projects, older releases, sales, subscriptions, and free-to-play games.

GTA 6 flops. Not that it won't recoup its costs or make a profit for Take-Two, but only a couple of hundred million. It won't become a megahit or a game of the generation. Consequently, the industry won't get the much-needed new investments and audience expansion.

This will lead to layoffs and studio closures. Even some giants will likely be affected (yes, I'm looking at Ubisoft). The console market will also be under threat, especially Sony and Microsoft, which were heavily banking on the super-profits from Rockstar's game.

The audience for traditional single-player games will continue to shrink and age, as new generations of players will increasingly choose free-to-play and mobile projects. (Related: 26 Best Addictive Mobile Games for Android and iPhone — Games to Kill Time). Prices might remain at the $70 level for a long time, but there will be noticeably fewer full-fledged blockbusters.

This is the most optimistic and perhaps the most fantastic option. GTA 6 is successful, attracts new audiences and additional investments to the industry, but the market doesn't try to turn every game into a new GTA.

Instead, major publishers pay attention to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Capcom games — projects that prove commercial success and cultural relevance can be achieved without budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, through a clear understanding of the audience, a unique concept, cost control, and long-term sales.

Another benchmark could be Nintendo. The company often justifies its high price tag not with photorealistic graphics and enormous production costs, but with exclusivity, brand recognition, quality of execution, and audience loyalty.

In this scenario, the market becomes more diverse, and pricing more flexible. More and more publishers will try not to make a game for everyone, but rather to satisfy the demands of specific audiences. The mid-budget segment will strengthen, and for major publishers, like 20–30 years ago, a diverse portfolio will become the norm, where alongside blockbusters there are several smaller-scale projects.

What do you think — what ultimately awaits us with the release of GTA 6? Share your opinion in the comments. It will be interesting to discuss.