$80 video games may not be the inevitability we assumed

The industry blinked on higher prices, and with good reason; AA is now the fastest-growing sector on PC and console

But it hasn’t really come to pass. While the industry holds its breath waiting for whatever Rockstar Games prices Grand Theft Auto 6 at, everyone else has backed down, including Microsoft, which announced and then scrapped a plan to move to $80 pricing. Players seemed too price-sensitive, and publishers blinked.

This year, a radically different narrative is emerging. Publishers may soon be looking at how to make games cheaper, not more expensive.

The game that has thrust this question to the front of everyone’s minds is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Sandfall Interactive’s breakout role-playing game. Clair Obscur’s success is conspicuous; it has sold very well (if not outstandingly so), swept every Game of the Year award going, even secured its development team a French knighthood. It’s a large-scale, graphically rich adventure. And it costs $50.

According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Clair Obscur was on everyone’s lips at the DICE industry conference in Las Vegas in February, a convention that’s particularly popular with video game executives. People wanted to know how Sandfall had made its game for so little money ($10 million, reportedly) and what other lessons they could learn from its success. Schreier posited one obvious lesson: make games cheaper (or make cheaper games, which isn’t quite the same thing).

He has a point. A new report from data analysis firm Newzoo on the PC and console market says that, within “premium” (i.e. paid) gaming, the fastest-growing sector across platforms is games in the $30-$50 dollar range. (The platforms in question are Xbox, PlayStation, and Windows PC; Newzoo doesn’t track Nintendo Switch.) “Mid-price is the new sweet spot everywhere,” Newzoo says.

On Xbox, revenue from games in this price range has grown 45% between 2022 and 2025. (This figure is at the lower end because many mid-priced titles, such as Clair Obscur and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, go straight to Game Pass.) On PC, the figure is 60%. On PlayStation, revenue from mid-priced games has grown an incredible 99% in three years.

Newzoo’s graphs show the contribution to these figures from back catalog games is static, and all the growth comes from new releases like Clair Obscur, Oblivion, Mafia: The Old Country, Arc Raiders, Helldivers 2, Ready or Not, Dune: Awakening, and Split Fiction. There’s a mix of genres represented here, but it’s interesting to note the rise of the mid-priced multiplayer game as free-to-play live-service games like Highguard struggle.

On PC, sub-$30 games are also thriving, thanks to the virality of Steam hits like Schedule 1, Peak, Dispatch, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. On consoles, this market segment is dramatically smaller, and dominated by Minecraft, but it’s still growing fast (around 50% over three years on PlayStation).

It’s important to get some perspective. Full-priced games are still hugely dominant on PlayStation and Xbox, making up between 76% and 89% of premium games revenue over the last four years. Their share is slipping, and sub-$50 games are progressively eating into their market. But part of this is down to a shortage of new releases, and it’s easy to imagine the graph for 2026 — or whichever year GTA 6 eventually releases in — looking quite different.

PC is a different matter. In 2025, 32% of premium games revenue came from sub-$30 games, 25% from $30-$50 games, and 39% from $50+ releases. (The remaining 4% comes from subscription games like World of Warcraft.) That’s a remarkably even split. And this great plurality of PC games of all prices is rapidly eating into the console market. Newzoo forecasts that global revenue from PC game software, driven by Steam, will surpass all console game software (including Nintendo) by 2028. That’s a lot of sub-$50 games.

The messages from Newzoo’s research are clear. People are buying more games at cheaper price points. Players want to pay less for games, but they do want to pay for them; free-to-play revenue and playtime is declining. It follows that in this market, the $80 game is not going to fly — unless it’s something like GTA 6 — and publishers have been wise to retreat from that precipice.

That said, an interesting precedent was set this week when Amazon decided to price the physical edition of Pokémon Pokopia at $80 in the face of intense demand and short supply. Collectors who insist on physical copies of their games might not be so well protected from price rises. Another, even more disturbing precedent is being set by PlayStation, which is testing dynamic pricing in regions outside the US at the moment. If recommended retail prices can’t go up, game companies and retailers will start looking at all sorts of other ways to claw their margins back.

But by and large, exceptional cases aside, it seems the $70 price cap will hold firm. That will make it increasingly hard for publishers to make money in AAA. In the face of that reality, AA — the magic $30-$50 “sweet spot” — represents a considerable opportunity. But a shift to AA is a much bigger change for the industry than just raising prices. It means making different types of games, and making them in different ways. It will take years to change course like this. But it needs to happen.