The industry is panicking.. NO ONE is buying $80 games

Game prices are collapsing. I think I've noticed this too. Remember how everybody was talking a few months ago about how we're gonna be thinking, maybe a year ago or so, about how we need to be expecting 70 and now 80 dollar video games to become the norm?

We've all been hearing this constantly. Oh, everybody should get used to this, this is how it's going to be.

Well...

The customer's always right. And they said you're wrong.

I've heard you. And with today's story, it seems the rest of the industry is also beginning to hear you. Now, this year started with the fear that gaming is getting more expensive. Yeah. Microsoft and Nintendo pushed the ceiling to $80. An impossibly high ask, especially as everything else has got more and more pricey. But elsewhere in the industry, something quieter is happening. And it's this.

The games that you are actually buying? Well, we've got the data about them. And as it turns out, they're getting cheaper. $100 for Grand Theft Auto VI. That was the rumor that kicked off this year's anxiety

about game prices. It was one the Take-Two have been having.

I still think it's possible that GTA will be $100. I do. I think it's possible. I think GTA is in its own category of game though, and I don't think that the way GTA is approached should be looked at as a frame of reference for anything other than GTA.

Happy to downplay, if not outright refute. But with GTA now delayed, we won't know the truth until next autumn. Though we've already seen audiences reject the new price ceiling of 80 bucks. Xbox tried to put The Outer Worlds 2 at 80 bucks, presumably buying some headroom for Microsoft's lovely 30% profit margin demand. But they quickly reversed that decision. The inference from that? They didn't see enough pre-orders. People essentially voted

with their wallet, just that unlike real v- I am so happy this is happening. That people are actually just not buying video games that are ridiculously expensive. Now I think the reason, like there's like 10 probably different reasons why, but I'm glad to see it finally happening. This is a relief.

Good job, boys. Yep. Hold strong. Yep.

And I think eventually video game prices will go up, because inflation makes everything go up infinitely, right? I mean, when we're old, we're going to think about the good old days when video games were only $100. Like, this is inevitable with inflation. But the rate at which it's happening nowadays is just, it's a little bit too fast.

And also, like, whether you want to talk about development costs or anything else, if you can't meet customers where they're at, then your product isn't going to have a market. It's just that simple.

You can pay that price for the Outer Worlds too. But you know what they would pay?

The regular price. Because selling at a normal price, the game did have a top 10 launch. Though, the right product at $80 will sell. Mario Kart World kind of proved that. Even bundled with Switch 2 for many buyers,

you don't get a 92% attach rate across 9.57 million copies without lots of people shelling out the full amount. Of course. That's only one side of this story because the reality we need to dive into. Well, and it's also, it's like the first console game, like the Switch 2 doesn't have a lot of games on it that are like worth buying a Switch 2 for. Like, unless you want to play Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom at 60 FPS,

I don't think that it has like a huge audience or a huge offering of games. It's kind of like the PS5. Hey. Yeah, it's an audio competition.

Prices have been plummeting, but there's a lot so funny thing hanging over all of this. And it's the simple fact that video game spending is actually falling, but subscriptions are rising. We've seen that in analyst reports and too often, well, we're paying for subs we don't use.

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You can get some for free, play around, have some fun, save some money and then unlock more features with premium. And that's rocket money dot com slash Ballylor news. What a nice guy. If you've bought a game on Steam in the last 18 months, you probably paid $20 or less. In fact, you've probably been paying less since 2023 than you did from 2020. What are these numbers?

Well, these numbers are from the research of Simon Carles, who runs the excellent Game Discoverer Co. newsletter. He tracked average and median prices for the top 50 new monthly games on Steam during that period of time, ranked by copy sold, and you're looking at the graphs now. We see a median price as low as $10, as high as $20, with averages between $16 and $29. Shocker.

So, yeah, I mean, prices very clearly have been going down. If you look at this here, it's been going down massively. Like, if you look at, if it's's $19 then and it's $14 now, that's a decrease of fucking 25%. That's crazy.

Steam users are 50 people who like deals. We probably didn't need this much analysis to work that out, but that's not where I'm ending.

Here's where things get less steam.

Exactly.

February 2023 to October 2025, the average amount of money spent on a best selling game went down by two percent. The median, though, it went down by 20 percent. That means more games are selling at a lower price. Yeah. And whenever Carlos took a look at the easy to predict,

the trend actually held.

Now, in theory, that should favour more expensive games. Well it's also because people don't want to highly invest into one game, and I think that like another factor is that a lot of games are like really long, and I think that people nowadays are looking for shorter, more bite-sized gaming experiences, just in a general sense. Like not like for everything, but just overall, I think it's very true. When you get bored of games. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so like, if you buy a

game for like $20 or $15, then I think that you're less invested in it and worried about playing it all the time and finishing it because you don't have that much money you've spent on it. And so it makes people feel more like better, more better makes them feel better about spending the money in the first place. I think that's what happens.

Generate more revenue per sale. But even there, the median dropped from twenty three dollars seventy five cents to twenty dollars thirty five cents.

And I think another big factor is that there were a lot of triple A games this year that weren't very good. And like that's also a big factor because like if you look at just a handful of those games they're going to move the price point up a lot. But a lot of the games have been bad.

That's about 14% of a drop. And do bear in mind that as this has been happening, the currency has been inflating. So even as players feel like they are being pressured towards $80 games, what they're actually buying is getting cheaper and cheaper. And what's key is that this is not showing us what has been offered to players. It's showing us what players have actually chosen. It's showing the best selling premium games on the platform. And that does feel

like a bit of a win, right? Yeah, I mean look at that. 20, 10, 70, 60, 10, 70, 25, 15, 20, 7, 70, 75. That's a lot of really cheap games. That's a huge amount of them.

Then we are seeing smaller teams with cheaper games beginning to dominate the sales space. That says a lot for the value of Steam, And in a world where people would have to compare the price of a full console, plus a subscription for multiplayer and more expensive games, and weigh that up to a Steam machine

with generally far cheaper games, well, I think it also makes the Steam machine look stronger as well. Overall though, it's somewhat validating an argument you see all the time, right? The argument people make every time someone suggests

an $80 price point, which is that you make your profit in aggregate, so make your games cheaper and then more people will buy them. Buying four $20 indie games is to many people better than one $80 AAA game.

Well, I mean, the best proof of this isn't even that, it's the fucking free-to-play games Like all these free-to-play games are cheap. They're super cheap to play They're free, but the difference is that they make their money with micro transactions And that's what I think you're gonna see more games doing is that creating a lower entry point? But then having things inside of micro transactions In general because like really asking somebody to spend $70

and they don't even necessarily know whether they like something or not, that's pretty hard to ask somebody to do. Surely that's what's going on.

Surely that's what everyone is doing.

Yeah.

Well, ish.

Let's look more into the- Surely. Carlos gave us the perfect example. It's the September releases on Steam where Silksong sold like gangbusters at 20 bucks, with 4.6 million copies shifted on the same loan. That's nearly double the sales of a full-priced title like Borderlands 4. The immediate takeaway is a lower barrier to entry at the price

of a couple of coffees, meaning you give yourself the widest possible audience. Well it's also like somebody sees Silksong is really popular and they look at it and they're like, oh, it's only like 20 bucks. Okay. Yeah, I'll try it out. But like if they see a game and they see it's doing kind of well or even really popular

and they see it's $70 like a $70 purchase is a big decision for a lot of people. A $20 purchase isn't quite as much. And so whenever you're dealing with those big numbers, and like, you know this if you're broke, that it's easy to get $20 and it's impossible to get a hundred. Because like by the time that you get to a hundred, something will have happened that you've needed to spend your money that now you're back down to zero again. I think that's what happens. And in theory, that also means that more people can buy more

games, but it's actually not quite that simple. You see, regardless of price, the majority of game players don't actually buy that many games. Sir Cana's future of games reports survey two and a half thousand US players on self-reported purchase patterns. About a third of the market says they buy just one game or fewer a year.

Just two thirds, 63% by fewer than two games a year.

I wonder how does yeah, I wonder like about free to play games. How does that factor into it?

Absolutely insane to me, but it's not.

It's like Fortnite, Roblox, stuff like that. Norms are because those are the most popular video games, right? Like a lot of the most popular video games in the world right now are free and like some people are mono gamers for these free games so it's hard to say maybe you do the same we probably have a sampling bias one that is in and around enthusiast gamers yeah sure we do buy more games but it seems that with broader audiences that is less the case yeah now obviously that's sir canana doing a survey of two and a half thousand people in the US.

It's good enough work. It's hypothesis generating work, but obviously it is just a survey.

So I would say that when you think about games overall, a lot of it is plausible. You see, a lot of people are only interested in buying this year's sport game or this year's Call of Duty. Or maybe not this year's Call of Duty. Or maybe not this year's Call of Duty. Maybe they bought Battlefield instead. But the majority of any product-based industry is often people who are gently engaged in it.

Not people, perhaps, like you and me. But it's actually the top of the chart that complicates things here. Because those people probably aren't the ones buying indie games for $20 on mass. No, that's the other 37% of people, but even that 37% is quite stratified. 22% say they buy a game every three months. That's four games a year, and that adds up to the Valves own data.

Yes, Valves own data suggests that users played only four games on Steam on average in 2023 and 2024.

I feel like that's not a big surprise. Like a lot of my friends probably play about that many too, like, you know, plus minus one I'd say. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people aren't going around playing constantly a bunch of games. And also like there's been a trend where more and more people play one singular big game all the time.

And I think that's's what's been happening a lot is that like people get invested like the same as like people there are people that are not gamers but they play World of Warcraft every single day all day and they've been doing that for the last 10 years. I used to be one of them. So really I think it's extremely common to see people that are only playing a handful of games because they're already invested into one singular game. Further 10% buy a new game monthly, which is of course a new game.

A lot of games in perspective. If you bought silk song and any other game in September, two games in one month, then you are only 4% of the games market. It's kind of wild. And even if we're allowed to some swing and fuzziness because a survey is only as good as the survey, the point I think will be the same.

And of course it's a point that we do see in a lot of other things as well. Take whaling, right?

Whaling and free to play games where the majority of the revenue does come from a very small

strata of that game's playerbase. And when we see data like that, I think we begin to understand why all of those publishers and indie devs moved their releases away from Silksong, or

of course, away from GTA 6. And in the case of the indies, what especially be-

Is he just throwing shit at him? ...the same price point or cheaper than Silksong. So if you're releasing against Silksong, a game with massive cutthroat to enthusiast audiences. If you're releasing against that, then well, you're betting on the 4% of the market turning up. It does actually buy multiple games a month.

That doesn't really seem-

Do you remember all the developers that were mad at Silksong for releasing their game? They were like, you can't just release the game whenever you want. You have to tell us when it's going to come out. You can't just release it right now. Well, what about our game?

Jesus Christ.

Remember that?

That was ridiculous.

Well, here's the kicker.

What if I told you there's another layer? You see, this chart does not distinguish between new games and already released games that are on sale. Every time someone buys a game that's been out for six months, they're probably not buying a new game that month to go along with it, regardless of price.

So, more people aren't buying games, even as prices keep trending down.

Now, if that is-

Because they don't need to. That's the reason. Like, you go and you look, right? This shit's free. You just play it. You just log on and play the game.

That's it that's crazy

so why does somebody need to go and spend all this money to play a game if you could just play a game for free? In any case as a bunch of this data suggests that's a lot well why then are

audiences feeling like they are constantly being asked for more and

more?

When people are asked to pay 80 bucks or 70 bucks for a video game, Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony are basically banking on a fairly simple principle—that the people who actually have money will spend it regardless of anything else that's going on. Essentially, they're betting on it being a premium product with inflexible demand. That is why marketing teams Target those people. That's why those absurd collector's editions exist, right? The people who absolutely-

That's for Wales. Like a hundred and nine dollars for a collector's edition of a game. That's insane.

Of games and have money. Ridiculous. They're the people these companies can count on. The games industry basically thrives in people who can spend without thinking about it.

How about the console players? They're ostracizing half of the gaming community when you determine if a game is good or not based on how it does on Steam. I think that a slice of apple pie is still indicative of the fact that it came from an apple pie. So when you take a representative sample from a group of people, then that representative sample is being used to create a larger trend. So are there going to be games that are more popular on console than PC and vice versa? Sure, of course. But I think the general trend is that if a video game is like doing very well on console it's probably also doing very well on pc and if it's doing well on pc it's probably also doing well on console like i've never really heard of

a game that's like a massive failure on one cons on one thing but it's like really it's doing great on another generally and this is especially true for trend graphs right so like the numbers might be wildly different, like for example, Call of Duty is much more popular on console for example, or FIFA. FIFA is another good example, but I bet the player base for FIFA and the people that are regularly playing FIFA, like let's say on console it started at a

million and on PC it started at a hundred thousand. I would expect that by the middle of the year, theoretically, if console went down to 500,000, then PC would also go down to 50,000, respectively. And I think that's generally what you can do. So a representative sample is not a numerical guide, but it should be used as an inference point to decide where the data is going. Does that make sense?

Which has always been the case. Buying more than one $60 game at launch has been unaffordable for people for years. But the problem, well, the problem is the proportion of people with money to spend freely actually does appear to be shrinking. Get this. As of September-

No way! We've never been to the store before! The top 10% of earners accounted for 50% of US retail sales, and the very same year, spending- Oh my god. Top 10- that's- I've never heard of this statistic. Top 10% of earners drive a growing share of consumer spending.

Wow.

That's nuts.

Here, spending and games is actually down. The 18 to 25 age group in the US is spending nearly a quarter less in games this year. And everyone just is a lot less than I expected. A couple of percent. On the whole, most game spending is only a few points down. Now, given we're in rough economic times, that could seem like a good thing, right?

Oh, the world is experiencing troubles, but games are only down in most categories by a few percent. What if I told you it's actually worse than that?

You see, the difference that because those have grown all year. But that comes from the- That's why everybody's doing subscription services, is that everybody complains about it, but they still buy them. That's the problem. They still buy them, even if they complain. Do you think economies will improve or die more? I think the economy will increasingly become more polarized, where people that don't have a lot of money will continue to have an increasingly less amount of money and people that do have more money will increasingly generate more money and more wealth. I think that's very clearly where things are going. This is not a five head prediction. This is a middle of the bingo free square prediction. You can just watch the trend. It's been happening for the last 50 years. ...bottom of the spending population, not the top, right?

That's where we're at. This is why I put my daughter on OnlyFans. That's great. Good for you. And I think that is the big tension that people are feeling. We're in a situation where game marketing, traditional big games are basically out of reach to most of the audience. More so than perhaps ever in recent

memory. But the companies haven't changed how they talk to players as a whole. A lot of the market has changed underneath those companies, but it's not really like it seems they've really changed their comms to match. And that is leading to people feeling ignored. It's leading to people facing demands that they cannot meet. That's because the companies that used to be targeting them are now not targeting them. They are targeting someone with more disposable income.

That's right. That's what happens with free-to-play games. This is why every free-to-play game ends up catering to whales. It's because imagine you don't vote but somebody else votes $5,000 a year that's a lot of votes and that's exactly what happens why would you pay $70 for a game just to get disappointed when you can buy four to seven indie games for that money exactly yeah it's just it's a huge amount of money $80 for a digital copy of a video game that's not even a collector's edition i'm sorry but like yeah you're gonna have some people that are in that top 10% of income.

Like I would say that the top 30% of people in America can afford something like that without it being really, you know, a very high friction transaction. But I would say that maybe 50% of people and this is in America, right? This is one of the richest countries in the world. Think about what it's like everywhere else in the world. So when you're selling a video game and you're only able to monetize 30% of the most developed countries in the world,

well, you're going to have a hard time making a lot of money. That's a tough game to stomach. It's just the game to stomach. But by contrast, the $20 games on Steam are changing. Individual indie developers are watching game prices creep lower and lower. And they're just hoping that they will get enough sales to succeed because they cannot afford to price higher and risk player blow. Now we're not quite in the mobile game space where developers basically can't

afford to price games as premium products anymore. But we are seeing a shift in how games are sold. And what that may lead to may not be great for all of us. Because if you can't ask players for more than 25 bucks without facing comparisons to Silksong, then you may start having to scope your development very differently indeed. That's where they're going to use AI. That's why they're going to use it. It's to save costs. And that means that some traditional games simply would be out of reach. It could also mean that we- If you can't go to market with a viable consumer product,

then you don't deserve to be in the market. That's the way it is. That's life. You don't like it? You think it sucks? It's not fair? Let's say you're right about everything. You still go out of

business.

I do feel more and more nickel and dimed. So, it's not all doom and gloom. It actually

seems there's a lot of vibrancy in the indie scene. I think that video gaming right now is better than it's ever been. I will say that. I think it's not even close.

Seeing is a changing market, changing behaviors, and it's a lot better sector that is struggling to keep up pace with that change. So no wonder they're out of touch. And speaking of out of touch,

Yep.

Bungie. That's certainly something a lot of people would say about them.

And they just passed them on.

That's so good, huh?

It's so rosy news. Basically, a big write-off at the same time that they kind of admitted they just shat the bed with Destiny 2.

If you want to learn about that, watch this video next. Man, I do feel like this is a good video and I'm very glad to see that game prices are going down Like I was actually pretty worried that this wasn't what was going to happen But if I look at this graph, right, I mean, this is a crazy decline In price for video games, and I hope that it continues, right? Now I think that's paying like paying 50 60 bucks for a game. That's fine If it's a fully AAA game.

And even $70, like, I mean, realistically, would I pay so- Lemme give the video a like, it's a Bellagor video, I liked it a lot. And I always love graphs like this that really kind of show what people are doing. Bungie's gay? Is Bungie gay? I think they could be.

And I only buy games on sale? Yeah, I think a lot of people do. But hardware prices are going up. How can I play cheap games? Well, you've got to buy consoles, right? And this is what's going to happen is that console prices are a lot more stable than the price of PCs because PCs have granular costs, right? Or aggregate costs. So you have like the cost of, you know, right now the RAM, which is really expensive, and then the power supply, and then the motherboard. And so if one of those goes up, it's going to

raise the price of everything. But whenever you're making a console, the console's price is pretty much fixed. So in some cases, that's a good thing. In other cases it's a bad thing. But I think that in general it just depends on what you want to do. So that's what I would say more than anything. There's no RAM in my PS5. Well, the way that PS5s and consoles don't go up and down in price based off of individual

computer component pricing. That just doesn't happen. And I think that if it did happen, it would be suicide for that company. And so that's the point that I'm making about it. Like, yes, very obviously, you know, RAM does go up and down, and it is in consoles, but it's not treated as this, you know, again, aggregate asset

that's factored into the price of the console dynamically. And so that's the difference. Recharge, chatter? Yeah, of course. So like Xbox, tell it to Xbox. Well, I know that they increase the prices because of tariffs, right? But that's something that's very specific. And I wouldn't really expect that to be the norm. So

yeah, that's at least what I'm thinking about it, what I what I yeah, that's at least what I'm thinking about it, what I what I think is going to happen.