The Rising Cost of Gaming and Why Tariffs Are Just the Beginning

Get a steam deck, dive into the indie world and forget about all those issues.

Games at 80$ only affect you if you buy them. There are tons of games under 30 that are good enough to keep you playing without making you poor.

It is true that general inflation over time and the tariffs increase the material costs of actual gaming hardware...

But uh, higher game prices?

The ballooning cost of game development?

Those things are almost entirely a result of the ossification of major publishers and studios into smaller and smaller numbers of bigger and bigger ultimate owners, who are all responsible to their investors... who are only interested in next quarter profit, which makes sensible long term strategy basically impossible.

And also the ... just generally absurdly incompetent internal management and strategic decision making within major game studios/publishers.

Just go look into basically any major AAA (or god forbid AAAA) game in the last 5 or 10 years, and you'll find that management is basically bipolar/schizophrenic, constantly making and then unmaking decisions, constantly laughably out of touch when it comes to estimating the market for or appeal of their games.

Also also, it doesn't help that the GPU market is basically a monopoly, and the new graphical paradigm (and development paradigm) is basically the equivalent of the entire US car market shifting to oversized luxury trucks and SUVs that most people can't actually afford... instead of offering a wider range of 'cars' for a wider range of 'drivers'...

Nor does it help that various IPs basically have a death grip on their fanbases, who will not stop giving them money no matter how many bugs are in their games, how many broken features they release with, no matter how much they cost.

...

The gaming scene is going to (and to a large extent arguably already has) bifrucate along the same wealth disparity lines that society is more broadly:

Huge numbers of people playing cheaper, older games, or indie releases...

And a smaller and smaller number of people playing absurdly overproduced, but very gameplay formulaic, 'safe', boring kinds of games... which cost more and more.

...

The 'games journalism' industry has largely been incapable of or unwilling to take the on the actual core problem: Capitalism.

Unrestrained, unregulated, unnacountable capitalism leads to monopolies/oligopolies that stop truly competing, and start extracting rent, and internally, culturally, they become more and more incompetent, inefficient, wasteful, and basically delusionally entitled.

...

To go back to the car metaphor:

Nissan is basically on the verge of collapsing.

Nissan was in talks to merge with Honda... but those talks fell through.

Why?

Because Nissan execs felt disrespected by the proposal that Nissan ... still maintain its brand, but ultimately be a subdivision of Honda.

... Because that would mean a bunch of Nissan management and C Suite would now be redundant, and thus either let go, or functionally demoted.

Nissan wanted a more equal partnership merger... despite themselves being objectively less competent at managing both its finances and general operations.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/inside-collapse-nissan-hondas-60-billion-mega-deal-2025-02-12/

So now Nissan is pretty much guaranteed to just collapse, unless METI just strongarms them into accepting some kind of deal, which will now almost certianly be on worse terms than the original Honda merger deal.

This same kind of dynamic of delusionally entitled yet also objectively incompetent management/c suite is also whats driving nearly all the bullshit in the video game industry generally.