Today’s computer game consoles are numerous dollars more costly than you ‘d anticipate based upon historical prices patterns. That’s according to an Ars Technica analysis of years of prices information and price-cut timing throughout lots of significant United States console releases.

The general instructions of this pattern has actually appeared to market watchers for a while now. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have actually stopped working to cut their console rates in the last few years

When you crunch the numbers, it’s quite extraordinary simply how much today’s console costs defy historical expectations, even when you account for higher-than-normal inflation in current years. If today’s consoles were seeing anything like what utilized to be market price cuts gradually, we might be paying around $200 today for expensive systems like the Switch OLED, PS5 Digital Edition, and Xbox Series S.

Crunching the numbers

To figure out the level these days’s relative console overpricing, we dug through old report, news release, ads, and shop brochures for yearly rate information returning to the Atari 2600’s launch in 1977. We utilized irreversible MSRP statements any place possible so that short-term sales or store-specific closeouts would not impact the information. If a console dropped in cost numerous times in one year, we took the most affordable cost from that year. We then changed all the small rates for inflation to constant July 2025 dollars utilizing BLM’s CPI calculator.

The resulting trendlines can be a bit loud from console to console. Some traditional consoles saw substantial, extreme cost drops after simply a year on the marketplace, typically before vanishing from racks entirely quickly later. Others remained at their small launch rate for a year or 3, letting inflation gradually chip away at that worth of those dollars before lastly dropping the cost as a method to reinforce delayed sales for aging hardware.

In general, however, you can see a clear and considerable down pattern to the year-over-year rates for video game consoles launched before 2016. After 3 years on the marketplace, the mean video game console throughout this duration expense less than half as much (on an inflation-adjusted basis) as it did at launch. Consoles that remained on the marketplace enough time might anticipate more sluggish cost disintegration with time, till they were costing approximately 43 percent of their launch cost in year 5 and about 33 percent in year 8.

That sort of severe price-cutting is a remote memory for today’s video game consoles. By year 3, the mean console presently on the marketplace costs about 85 percent of its genuine launch cost, thanks to the impacts of inflation. By year 5, that mean launch rate ratio for modern-day consoles in fact boosts to 92 percent, thanks to the small rate boosts that numerous consoles have actually seen in their 4th or 5th years on the marketplace. And the eight-year-old Nintendo Switch is presently costing about 86 percent of its inflation-adjusted launch cost, or more than 50 portion points greater than the mean pattern for earlier long-lived consoles.

To be reasonable, today’s video game consoles are not the most costly the market has actually ever seen. Systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Neo Geo, and 3DO went for costs that would be well over $1,000 in 2025 cash. More just recently, systems like the PS3( $949.50 at launch in 2025 dollars) and Xbox One($689.29 at launch in 2025 dollars) were considerably costlier than the $300 to $600 variety that includes the majority of today’s consoles.

When traditional consoles released at such high rates, those costs never ever lasted really long. Even the most pricey console launches of the past dropped in cost rapidly enough that, by year 3 or two, they were down to inflation-adjusted rates similar to today’s consoles. And traditional consoles that gone for more affordable rates generally saw rate cuts that took them well into the sub-$300 variety (in 2025 dollars) within a couple of years, making them a relative deal from today’s point of view.

What’s keeping costs high?

Why are today’s consoles remaining so stubbornly resistant to historical price-drop patterns? Higher-than-normal inflation recently describes a few of the small cost inflexibility, however absolutely nothing near to all of it. Even when you change for inflation, some present consoles like the Xbox Series S and PS5 Pro are more costly on a genuine basis today than they were on launch day.

The unpredictability and additional import expenses of Trump administration tariffs certainly play some part in the modification, as console makers obliquely referral by pointing out “market conditions” or a “challenging economic environment” in their price-raising statements. Even before current tariffs, modern-day console costs weren’t dropping almost as quick as history recommended they should. Sony initially raised the small beginning cost of the PS5 Digital Edition back in 2023, method before Trump’s existing trade war was even on the horizon.

A few of that earlier cost drop wariness might have been because of pandemic-related chip scarcities, which console makers at the time cautioned were keeping hardware materials well listed below need. All signs recommend those worldwide supply chain impacts were more or less ameliorated by early 2023 and might not have actually been as substantial as they appeared from the exterior.

Amidst all those macroeconomic aspects, the downturn in Moore’s Law, particularly, looks like a most likely prospect for today’s persistent console prices. As we’ve talked about in depth just recently, the rate of development in microchip production has actually slowed over the last few years, making it more difficult than it remained in the past to establish less expensive and/or smaller sized variations of console hardware.

That describes why expenses for hardware makers have actually stayed greater than typical. In the past, console makers have actually revealed a desire to offer hardware at a loss when required to make the cash back on software application sales. Systems like the PS3, Xbox One, Wii U, and 3DS saw very fast cost drops after less-than-stellar launch receptions, recommending they were slashing or getting rid of hardware earnings well before any production cost savings might be handed down to customers.

The reality that we’re not seeing such cost cutting today might be analyzed as an indication that present console rates aren’t too expensive for the marketplace to bear. Back in 2022, we kept in mind how the ahistorical absence of a Switch rate drop didn’t appear to be moistening that system’s traditionally strong sales. The exact same appears to be real of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, which are offering quickly in spite of an absence of cost drops. And while the Xbox hardware line might be having a hard time for client attention nowadays, Microsoft likewise appears less thinking about offering the special video games that would generally assist validate the purchase of an Xbox (and possibly more thinking about rotating to Windows-based video gaming hardware like the upcoming ROG Xbox Ally).

Simply put, console rates aren’t dropping in part due to the fact that the marketplace isn’t requiring them to. As long as today’s console makers are pleased with sales at their present levels, the cost drops consumers pertained to anticipate traditionally will continue to be a distant memory.