I’ve been gaming for decades, and I can’t recall a time when we’ve seen so many great games released so regularly. I’d argue that this is the biggest blockbuster year in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected in November, and publishers terrified of releasing their games around the same time have packed the next couple of months with high-profile new launches such as Control Resonant, Ace Combat 8 and Modern Warfare 4.

However, actually owning these games and having the appropriate hardware to play them is a different story; $1,000 consoles, skyrocketing component costs, $80 games and you-don’t-own-it ownership are making it hard to enjoy gaming the way I once did.

Hardware price shock

Last year, it seemed as though the tariffs instituted by President Donald Trump were going to significantly raise the cost of gaming hardware. While they did have an impact, the biggest driver behind the current price nightmare for the video game industry is the ongoing memory and storage shortage. AI companies are tying up production resources for computer components needed to power their data centers, causing supply problems for those used in consumer products.

The ripple effect is making the hardware needed for playing a lot of those great new games more expensive, and putting even budget PCs out of reach.

Consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X are now at least $100 more expensive than when they launched in 2020 — consoles typically drop in price a year or two after release as manufacturing costs decrease and demand starts to soften. Now, Microsoft is reportedly losing $150 a console. The Nintendo Switch 2 is slated to increase by $50 in September.

Mobile gaming is also affected, thanks to the rising price of the phones you need to run the latest action games.

Price hikes are the worst, though, for PC gaming systems. Valve’s Steam Machine, a micro PC designed to bring PC gaming into the living room, was speculated to cost around $700 when it was first revealed last November, estimated based on traditional pricing behavior. Instead, when it launched in June, the base model started at $1,049. Valve also increased the price of its Steam Deck handheld by more than $200, which the company attributed to the memory shortage.

Classic PC components are facing similar increases. GPU maker Nvidia says its graphics cards are going to increase by 20% to 30% across the board. Add-in memory prices have famously spiked up to twice as much since the end of 2025, earning the current situation the moniker “RAMageddon.”

It’s not expected to end anytime soon, either, which points to future complications. Microsoft and Sony are already deep into development of their next-generation consoles, with a new Xbox expected sometime in 2027 and the next PlayStation rumored for 2028. It’s likely they’ll be priced closer to $1,000 rather than the $500 of the current generation, which would put a next-generation console out of reach for many gamers at launch. Or it’s possible they might get delayed, breaking the pattern of past launches.

Creating great games seems unsustainable

Expensive or delayed debuts of new consoles, cutting-edge PCs and flagship phones aren’t just a problem for gamers who want the latest and greatest. PlayStation, Xbox and Switch launches, as well as new graphics cards and processors, are usually accompanied by the debut of cutting-edge games to show off advances in technology.

But the game development industry is not in great shape. Microsoft and Sony both reported disappointing game hardware sales in their latest fiscal quarters, and IDC expects PC shipments to fall by about 11% by the end of 2026.

Fewer consoles and PCs sold means fewer potential customers for every game released on those platforms. That creates a difficult situation where a studio can make a great game, sell millions of copies and still fall short of increasingly high expectations from publishers. When a title doesn’t meet sales projections, the consequences are often massive layoffs, studio closures and project cancellations.

The result is a strange contradiction with the industry producing some of the best games we’ve ever seen, but the companies and people responsible for creating those games are operating in an increasingly unstable environment. The same forces making gaming more expensive for players are also making it harder for developers to survive, creating a future where the biggest risk isn’t that games will stop being great, but that fewer studios will be around to make them. Or they’ll be increasingly crowded out by “eslop.”

Can you still own a game?

Another discouraging aspect of gaming today is the growing impermanence. For decades, owning a game meant you could do whatever you wanted with it, short of making copies to sell. Once you paid for a cartridge or disc, you could lend it to a friend, sell it, collect it or put it on a shelf knowing you could still play it years later as long as you had the requisite hardware.

Game ownership has become far more complicated and really more like renting. Most sales are digital, and physical media continues to make up an increasingly small percentage of the market. Most digital purchases are tied to accounts and licenses, though, so your ability to play the games depends on companies maintaining servers, storefronts and authentication systems.

But what happens when a company shutters those services? Publishers have chosen to stop supporting a growing number of games because they no longer have “enough” active players to justify the costs. (And as sales decrease, the bar defining “enough” gets lower and lower.) Once the servers go offline or the storefront closes, those games frequently become unplayable. Concern over this issue helped spark the Stop Killing Games movement, which contends that companies should find ways to preserve access to games after they are no longer commercially supported.

Buying a hard copy doesn’t always guarantee ownership, either. Nintendo recently made the controversial decision to sell Game-Key Cards for some Switch 2 games, which are physical cartridges containing only enough data to let you download the game and a license key to let you play it.

On one hand, it makes the game resellable, since the card makes one-license-one-copy enforceable. On the other hand, it still means the game can evaporate once the supporting services go offline — you can’t download it again if you move to another device. And if you don’t have access to fast or stable internet for the initial download, these cards are essentially useless.

The latest blow came when Sony announced plans to end production of physical game discs in 2028. The digital versus physical sales numbers support Sony’s strategy, but the announcement still sparked backlash as players’ frustration with non-ownership mounts.

Paying for the privilege of not owning a game is increasing as well, perhaps a little faster than before. The typical price for a cutting-edge AAA game rose from $60 to $70 in 2020 after 15 years, and it seems to be rising again this year. Mario Kart World for the Switch 2 was the first major game to launch with an $80 price tag, but Grand Theft Auto 6 will likely be the game that normalizes that price. And I expect more publishers to follow suit as development costs continue to rise.

One ostensible alternative to the high-price-of-gaming dilemma is cloud and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. But those are yet another degree further away from ownership, and as with movie and show streaming services, games vanish on a regular basis thanks to studio licensing agreements.

I’m looking forward to so many new games this year and into 2027. But I’m also looking back nostalgically to the days when hardware was affordable, I owned the games on which I spent big bucks, and I wasn’t so concerned about the chaos surrounding it all.

Oscar Gonzalez

Contributing writer

Oscar Gonzalez is a Texas native who covered video games, conspiracy theories, misinformation and cryptocurrency.

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