By Nermeen Nabil Khear 
Last week, Nintendo made waves across the game industry by announcing that Mario Kart World would sell for a suggested price of $80 in the US. That nominal price represents a new high-water mark both for Nintendo and for the game industry at large, which has generally reserved prices above $70 for fancy, trinket-laden collectors’ editions or Digital Deluxe Editions that include all variety of downloadable bonuses.
Console gaming’s nominal price ceiling has gone up pretty consistently in the last 40+ years.
Credit:
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
After adjusting for inflation, an $80 price level doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary.
Credit:
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
When you adjust historical game prices for inflation, though, you find that asking $80 for a baseline game in 2025 is broadly in line with the prices big games were commanding 10 to 15 years ago. And given the faster-than-normal inflation rates of the last five years, even the $70 nominal game prices that set a new standard in 2020 don’t have the same purchasing oomph they once did.
The data
Check out the premium pricing for Zelda titles above other NES games in the 1988 Sears catalog.
Credit:
Hughes Johnson
To judge Mario Kart World‘s $80 price against historical trends, we first needed to figure out how much games cost in the past. To do that, we built off of our similar 2020 analysis, which relied on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers for real examples of nominal console game pricing going back to the Atari era. For more recent years, we relied more on press reports and archived digital storefronts to show what prices new games were actually selling for at the time.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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