Console gaming's nominal price ceiling has gone up pretty consistently in the last 40+ years.
Credit:
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
After adjusting for inflation, an $80 price level doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary.
Credit:
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
When you adjust historical game prices for inflation, though, you find that asking $80 for a baseline game in 2025 is broadly in line with the prices big games were commanding 10 to 15 years ago. And given the faster-than-normal inflation rates of the last five years, even the $70 nominal game prices that set a new standard in 2020 don't have the same purchasing oomph they once did.
The data
$34.99 for Centipede on the Atari 2600 might sound cheap, but that 1983 price is the equivalent of roughly $90 today.
Credit:
Retro Waste
Check out the premium pricing for Zelda titles above other NES games in the 1988 Sears catalog.
Credit:
Hughes Johnson
If you wanted Streets of Rage 2 from Electronics Boutique in 1993, you'd better have been ready to pay extra.
Credit:
Hughes Johnson
To judge Mario Kart World's $80 price against historical trends, we first needed to figure out how much games cost in the past. To do that, we built off of our similar 2020 analysis, which relied on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers for real examples of nominal console game pricing going back to the Atari era. For more recent years, we relied more on press reports and archived digital storefronts to show what prices new games were actually selling for at the time.
Nintendo wants Mario Kart World to be the reason players buy a Switch 2. But can it really convince us to pay $80 for a game and $450 for a new console?Read More
The Nintendo Switch 2 could be considered the most direct "sequel" to a Nintendo console that the company has ever made. The lineage is right there in the name, with Nintendo simply appending the number "2" onto the name of its incredibly successful previous console for the first time in its history.
Nintendo's previous consoles have all differed from their predecessors in novel ways that were reflected in somewhat new naming conventions. The Switch 2's name, on the other hand, suggests that it is content to primarily be "more Switch." And after spending the better part of the day playing around with the Switch 2 hardware and checking out some short game demos on Wednesday, I indeed came away with the impression that this console is "more Switch" in pretty much every way that matters, for better or worse.
Bigger is better
We've deduced from previous trailers just how much bigger the Switch 2 would be than the original Switch. Even with that preparation, though, the expanded Switch 2 makes a very good first impression in person.
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