Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced

Today's video game consoles are hundreds of dollars more expensive than you'd expect based on historic pricing trends. That's according to an Ars Technica analysis of decades of pricing data and price-cut timing across dozens of major US console releases.

The overall direction of this trend has been apparent to industry watchers for a while now. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have failed to cut their console prices in recent years and have instead been increasing the nominal MSRP for many current consoles in the past six months.

But when you crunch the numbers, it's pretty incredible just how much today's console prices defy historic expectations, even when you account for higher-than-normal inflation in recent years. If today's consoles were seeing anything like what used to be standard price cuts over time, we could be paying around $200 today for pricey systems like the Switch OLED, PS5 Digital Edition, and Xbox Series S.

Crunching the numbers

To determine the extent of today's relative console overpricing, we dug through old news reports, press releases, advertisements, and store catalogs for annual price data going back to the Atari 2600's launch in 1977. We used permanent MSRP announcements wherever possible so that temporary sales or store-specific closeouts wouldn't affect the data. If a console dropped in price multiple times in one year, we took the lowest price from that year. We then adjusted all the nominal prices for inflation to consistent July 2025 dollars using BLM's CPI calculator.

The resulting trendlines can be a bit noisy from console to console. Some classic consoles saw significant, drastic price drops after just a year on the market, often before disappearing from shelves altogether shortly afterward. Others stayed at their nominal launch price for a year or three, letting inflation slowly chip away at that value of those dollars before finally dropping the price as a way to bolster lagging sales for aging hardware.