When Nintendo revealed its pricing plans for Nintendo Switch 2 and things related to it, outrage immediately spread throughout the gaming sphere. Just about everything about it was cause for concern, but the most distressing piece of news for many was that Nintendo would (and is still planning to) charge $70 for most Switch 2 games and even $80 for games from its premier series. It’s a shocking move, but there are those who are trying to rationalize and even defend it.

Former PlayStation CEO Shawn Layden recently jumped into the conversation, arguing that “with inflation,” games are, even at $80, actually cheaper now than they’ve ever been. He also gave an opinion to the effect that platform-holders like Nintendo and PlayStation should have been “baking-in” a $5 price hike each generation in order to ease gamers into paying more. It’s not a take many (myself included) would like, but to be fair to the man, it sounded less like something he thinks definitely should have happened, and more like something that would have been a better strategy if game makers wanted to raise prices.

I’ve been hearing the inflation argument for bandied about quite a bit since Nintendo’s announcement, and I’m sure everyone’s seen that old Toys R Us catalog page that’s been making the rounds. Yes, we’ve seen $70 games before. However, the people sharing this around are acting like all games were always that expensive in that period. They weren’t. I was there and I remember. $50-$60 was the standard price point even then, and there was actually a reason for it, namely the cost of manufacturing games and all the things that came with them.

(Note also that the $70+ games are either those that hardly anyone’s heard of. Or only sold just well enough to manage cult-status years later.)

Back then, you got more than just the game. You got a box, a cartridge a manual (often full color) and other little pack-ins. All those extras added to the cost and the value, as did the fact that each cartridge had a chip that had to be assembled. CDs were a relatively new technology too. Not to mention that the market was smaller, meaning it was more difficult to make money from bulk sales. Different time, different market, different costs.

Now we live in a world where digital downloads are king and gaming is bigger than movies, tv and music combined. Compared to the 80s, 90s, and 00s, production costs are minimal and the market is entire orders of magnitude bigger. The whole raising the price discussion wasn’t even a thing until 2015 or so, when AAA publishers and platform holders started making wildly unpopular decisions and really started letting production budgets balloon out of control.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. Sure, hiking things up $5 each generation might have “eased” gamers into higher prices more easily, but I doubt the business would be as big as it is now if that had been the practice.

Video games are, and have long been, an expensive hobby as they are, and jacking up game prices $5 each generation would have made it even worse. If they had been doing it since the days of the SNES, then we’d be at $90 standard for a game by now. I don’t know about you all, but I would have tapped out a long time ago if that were the case.

Another thing that people using inflation to make this sound reasonable either don’t consider or conveniently forget, is that salaries and wages haven’t kept up with inflation either. Buying power has greatly decreased since the 90s, and just about every necessity has grown more expensive Video games are and always have been a luxury, and luxuries are always what gets cut from the budget first.

There’s probably more that could be said on this, but I’ve probably already gone on about it too long as it is. Rather gradual or sudden, I think hiking up game prices is a bad idea and will only end up hurting everyone involved in the long run, maker and player alike. As for me, well, I now consider Nintendo a luxury that I cannot afford. If gaming as a whole follows suit one day, than perhaps it’ll be time to either hang up the controllers or live permanently in gaming’s past.

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How do you feel about Mr. Layden’s take? How do you feel about gaming becoming more expensive?

Image from the Nintendo website