Here’s why video games might get more expensive soon

Josh McKenzie needed cash.

The 20-year-old lost his job last month and needed to make rent. So the lifelong gamer walked into Rock 30 Games in Fargo to sell his PlayStation 5 and some video games.

“It felt like giving away my firstborn,” he said.

Gaming is just too expensive a hobby for him right now.

The price tags on some video games have been getting higher recently. Usually, video game consoles get cheaper with time, but Sony raised the price of the PlayStation 5 this year and Microsoft will follow suit soon with Xbox consoles. Games for those consoles also have higher prices compared to the previous generation.

“I definitely do fear about how it’s going to get pricey in the future,” he said. “Or, pricier.”

Comparisons with past generations of video games are tempered when adjusted for inflation, but gamers like McKenzie still feel squeezed.

Upcoming changes to the industry might make that worse.

Sony, the company behind PlayStation, announced that by January 2028, new games for its consoles will only be available digitally.

“Once this transition occurs, any new games that come out, they won’t ever come into the store,” said Matthew Johnson, regional manager for Rock 30 Games. “They won’t walk through the doors.”

That means the secondhand games market that McKenzie used to make back some money has a hard cutoff for new games. That also means no lending or giving away games directly to other players.

“Back in the day, we did that all the time. Whenever you played a single-player game, you were like, ‘Dude, you got to try this game,’” Johnson said. “You brought it to school the next day in your backpack and handed it to them.”

For its part, Sony said in its announcement that it is adapting “to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs.”

It’s true that gaming today is much different than it used to be and most new games are sold digitally. However, the ripple effects of the decision could still raise the price of gaming, even for people who don’t buy physical games, according to Brandeis University economist Ben Shiller.

“There’s a very large profit incentive for shutting down resale markets,” he said.

That’s in part because Sony and other companies can save money on manufacturing and shipping by ramping down disc production. They also get to keep more money from digital sales than physical ones, because they don’t have to split revenue with retailers.

Some of those savings may be passed on to consumers, Shiller said. But he added that companies also gain from consumers’ inability to buy and sell used games to each other and at secondhand stores.

That’s because PlayStation and other gaming publishers can set the price of the physical and digital games they sell, but they have no control over the prices of used games.

“They’re fairly close substitutes,” he said. “Maybe you prefer a digital copy because you want it right away, but if it’s $40 for the digital copy and $10 for the used [physical] copy, you might switch to the used copy.”

In other words, the secondhand market keeps digital prices in check.

“It does limit how much they can charge for the digital copy, and with those used games gone, there’s no market discipline,” he said.

In a 2013 paper, Shiller modeled how much Xbox, Microsoft’s gaming division, could profit from getting rid of the resale market altogether for games on its Xbox 360 console.

“They would have doubled their profits at the expense of consumers,” he said.

Backlash and Boycotts

Shiller said he presented his research at Microsoft in 2013, and shortly afterward, the company announced it would make changes that would curtail the ability to resell and share games on its Xbox One console.

Thirteen days later, Microsoft reversed course after “feedback from the Xbox community.”

Some are hoping PlayStation will follow suit now.

“People are furious,” said Ben Hanson, founder of Minneapolis-based YouTube channel MinnMax. “People are rightfully furious, and PlayStation is getting drowned by outrage.”

Some fans have begun organizing a “blackout” set for August, encouraging others to unplug their consoles for a week. Even unrelated social media posts from PlayStation since its disc announcement have been inundated with pushback on the decision.

“So many of [PlayStation’s] YouTube videos, the comments are flooded,” Hanson said. “Any live streams, the chat is going to be just flooded with ‘Bring back Discs’ [and] ‘PlayStation, how dare you do this to us?’”

But change is unlikely, Shiller said.

“What has changed since [2013] is physical copies no longer account for as large of a share of what’s sold,” he said. “People are used to buying these digital copies; they’re not anticipating resale because they can’t resell them anyway, and so there isn’t this same expectation.”

Cut-off for collectors

For some people, gaming is still a physical hobby. Sam Schaust lives in Minneapolis, where he has a collection of over 3,000 video games, retro and modern. For him, owning games is his way of connecting to other people.

“I kind of came from a troubled home, so for me [gaming] was an escapism thing. It was always this point of getting out of my shell, putting myself into a different headspace,” he said. “Secondarily to that, it was just a connection point for me and virtually almost all my friends growing up.”

Today, he’s essentially a library for his friends.

“When I needed help, I went to friends’ houses, and I stayed with them over the weekends or a lot of nights and it was like a second home for me,” he said. “When I got older, I kind of told myself I need to be that same person and provide a second home or a sanctuary for people that I care about, and at least have a space that people want to be in. Part of that for me was building this massive library.”

But as physical games production winds down, he won’t be able to do that with many new games.

Schaust said that he’s also concerned about consumer rights and whether “ownership” is even possible for digital games.

For example, he also collects vinyl records and DVDs. Music and movies are both available digitally, but the option to buy and own them physically still exists.

“Video games are the only thing currently that’s being shifted into a digital-only structure, and what that means is that, inevitably, when it’s digital-only everywhere, you’re never really going to own these things 100 percent,” he said.

Recent media reports of people temporarily losing access to decades-old Xbox and PlayStation accounts, as well as the broad revocation of previously purchased digital media, have fueled some of the backlash.

Shiller said access to digital products is dependent on the company that sold them, and some of the legal consumer protections that exist for physical media don’t exist for digital ones.

“When you had a physical copy of an item … you own that copy forever,” Shiller said. “With a digital product, however, consumers may believe they own it when they are actually getting a long-term rental that’s at the discretion of the seller.”

That distinction is already changing how Schaust spends his money, and he said he plans to wind down his gaming collection.

“I don’t anticipate I’m going to be buying PlayStation 5 games anymore,” he said, adding that he may make exceptions for games that are exclusive to the console. “Most of the money I’m going to be spending on games will be either through [other platforms] or through acquiring more of the older games that are out there.”