US Sales: November 2025 (Circana)

[Shadow1980]

Tober said:

The price of the console is not the challenge. That's a one time purchase. It's the price of the games.

It reminds me of the N64 era. The game pricing was a bit off putting. They really needed to have new gaming experiences that you did not get anywhere else to convince people.

Luckily in the N64 era there were games that where truly innovative like Mario64, Zelda OoT and offcourse 4 player (splitscreen) play. These sold well. Other offerings on the system not so much.

In 2025 it's much harder to really define gaming new, as in you HAVE to try this. Much of the games that come close are indies, those are affordable and perfectly playable on Switch1.

The PS1 does come out on top with 9.43 games per system compared to 6.83 for the N64. But the problem wasn't necessarily the price in absolute terms, but the gap between the prices. PS1 games were typically $40-50 (at least once Sony switched from the long boxes to the standard CD jewel cases; most long box games were $60), compared to $60-70 for N64 games, an average of about 50% more expensive than PS1 games. Of course, the tie ratio difference might not have been about pricing, at least not entirely. There was supposedly a huge gap between the SNES and Genesis, with the latter supposedly having a tie ratio over double that of the SNES, this despite both systems having the same software prices ($50-70/game). And this is despite a dollar being worth at least twice what it's worth now.

Today, there really isn't a huge gap in pricing. Most new retail-release games are still sitting in the $60-70 price range on all three systems, with a handful of Switch 2 games at $80. As others pointed out, most people don't buy a ton of games a year. Even over the course of a system's life, the average owner will only purchase 8 to 12 games. While even the increase to $70 for many games back in 2020 when the PS5 & XBS were released was met with wailing and gnashing of teeth by many hardcore gamers, a $10 price hike, the first in fifteen years, is only really a problem if you're the type of person that buys way more games than the average console owner, which would add up. Like, if you buy a hundred games for a system over its lifespan and spend $10 more per game, that would be $1000 more spent. That is indeed a lot of money. But again, most people don't buy nearly that many games for a console. $10 more per game would amount to at most $20 to $30 more per year or $80 to $120 over the entire life of the console for the average console owner, which isn't much. And again, there's inflation to take into account.

35 years ago people paid $200 for a Super Nintendo at launch (and it was down to $100 a year later), and the average owner probably paid around $480 on software, assuming every game bought new at an average of $60 and an average of eight games per owner. Now they'd pay $450 for a Switch 2 at launch, while paying maybe $560 for eight games over the course of the system's life. So, while nominal prices for software have remained relatively flat for decades, hardware prices have grown. Once you take inflation into account, software prices have technically trended downward while hardware prices have more or less kept up with inflation (the SNES's launch price was over $470 adjusted), and price cuts have become less frequent and smaller in terms of percentages. Either way you measure it, that up-front cost of purchasing the hardware itself has been an ever-growing share of the total cost the average console owner will expect to bear.