The return of the $70 video game has been a long time coming ~ USA Latest Games

Fig. 1: When adjusted for inflation, the top-end price for big-budget console games has never been lower than today's $60 (lines are a moving average of the last three data points).

Last week, 2K made waves by becoming the first publisher to set a $70 asking price for a big-budget game on the next generation of consoles. NBA2K21 will cost the now-standard $60 on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but 2K will ask $10 more for the upcoming Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of the game (a $100 "Mamba Forever Edition" gives players access to current-generation and next-generation versions in a single bundle).

It remains to be seen if other publishers will follow 2K's lead and make $70 a new de facto standard for big-budget console game pricing. But while $70 would match the high-water mark for nominal game pricing, it wouldn't be a historically high asking price in terms of actual value. Thanks to inflation and changes in game distribution, in fact, the current ceiling for game prices has never been lower.

The data

To measure how the actual asking price for console games has changed over time, we relied primarily on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers we found online. While this information was easier to find for some years than others, we were still able to gather data for 20 distinct years across the last four decades. We then adjusted those nominal prices to constant 2020 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI inflation calculator.

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