Gaming is Getting More, and Less, Expensive

Ballooning budgets, enormous teams consisting of hundreds – if not – thousands of staff, publishers raising prices, hardware prices spiking, tariffs—it’s easy to take a quick glance at the gaming landscape in 2025 and lament the hit that the consumer is expected to take in order to remain up to date with the latest releases.

And yet, at the same time, another story is unfolding. Smaller studios, indie projects and digital storefronts are offering incredible value for money, disrupting traditional practices and winning the hearts of players who don’t want to, or can’t afford to, spend huge sums on gaming experiences.

It seems that the videogames industry is increasingly becoming a dichotomy, prioritising entirely different approaches to production, and serving entirely separate target audiences. Let’s explore how gaming is becoming simultaneously more, and less, expensive.

“Triple A” Bloat

Traditional established studios and industry titans – the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, Rockstar and Electronic Arts – are comprised of thousands upon thousands of employees, and their projects are enormous, sprawling operations. As hardware advances push graphical fidelity and open up the possibility of larger, more ambitious worlds, the average development time for big budget video games has extended exponentially. As an example, between the years of 1997 and 2013, Rockstar produced every single Grand Theft Auto game thus far. This includes the seven (yes, seven) main releases, as well as an additional eight smaller titles, spinoffs and handheld games, totalling 15 games. In the years since 2013, they have released…no Grand Theft Auto games. Now, this comparison isn’t entirely fair because Rockstar also developed a number of other games after Grand Theft Auto IV such as Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire, but my point is that back when their games were less ambitious and realistic, new releases were more or less annual from the studio. Nowadays, behemoths the size of Red Dead Redemption II or the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI are projects that take upwards of seven years to produce. At the time of writing, Grand Theft Auto VI is slated to release in November of 2026. The game entered develoment in 2018, making this the longest development timeline of any Rockstar title. Estimates for the game’s development cost place it over the $1 billion mark, which will no doubt encourage the publishers, Take-Two, to charge a pretty penny for the title upon release, as it will mark the most expensive video game release of all time.

With the latest generation of consoles, many “Triple A” studios formally announced price increases of their games from £50 to £60, and this year Nintendo and Microsoft both announced that their prices for some first-party titles would be increasing to an eye-watering £70. Now, if you adjust prices for inflation, it can actually be argued that video game prices have functionally come down over time when compared to the prices of games back in the 1990s and 2000s. However, this argument doesn’t hold too much water when you consider the fact that wages haven’t risen consistently alongside inflation over this period, so it’s all rather confusing.

The truth of the matter is that it is becoming more arduous, resource-intensive and time-consuming to create games that utilise cutting-edge hardware and continue to push for photorealistic graphics. Only the largest and wealthiest industry leaders seem to be able to chase this goal, but it is becoming an increasingly monumental task to keep up and to keep expanding these enormous game worlds with ever-improving graphics, immersive features and engaging gameplay.

The Kids Don’t Like It

Studies are showing that younger generations of gamers are simply not buying into many of these big new expensive releases. In a world where many free-to-play titles such as Fortnite, Roblox, Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals, Dota 2 and many more can offer people enjoyable multiplayer experiences with their friends, why should they be spending £60 on the latest release when they can get their gaming fix for free? And in addition to the free-to-play titles, budget titles such as Minecraft have bucked trends by providing essentially endless possibilities with simple graphics that don’t require months and months of work from entire teams of artists.

Minecraft released in 2009, but its staying power amongst players is remarkable. Its simple yet charming graphics and Lego-esque creative freedom are appealing to younger, newer players, and the countless updates and features that have been added to the game -completely free of charge – combined with the game’s world generation tool, means that returning players will always have something new to discover. This is an incredibly good value prospect – you buy the game once for £20, and it can provide you with literally hundreds of hours of entertainment for years to come. And this clearly worked, because Minecraft is now the best-selling videogame of all time.

This model has been adopted by a huge swathe of games now. The aforementioned Fortnite and Roblox are similarly not interested in chasing realism or fidelity; instead they use distinctive and striking cartoony art styles that give them a more timeless look that also appeals to younger players. Similarly to Minecraft, they are “live service” titles that are regularly updated and maintained with new content which is free for the user, so people can keep coming back and having new experiences.

Many games that rely on this model offer paid cosmetics for players who wish to spend money on skins or emotes to further customise their experience, but this allows the core experience itself to remain free, and therefore offers an incredibly low barrier to entry for new players.

The Li’l Guys

Indie developers typically made up of three main types of people:

disillusioned industry veterans from large studios who want to bring things back to basics and bypass the enormous committee-led impersonal nature of large projects
Industry novices and newbies who either lack the formal experience to get into traditional development or began developing games as a hobby
Experimental artists whose work would likely be considered too “niche” or “risky” to become enormous triple-A projects

I’m sure that there is often a lot of overlap between these categories, but those three core elements are the foundation of many smaller games which have seen huge success. By not chasing the model laid out by the titans of the videogames industry I mentioned earlier, these smaller studios are able to remain nimble, consisting of tiny teams with budgets a fraction of the size of the latest releases, and development cycles that last just a couple of years. These more agile projects usually tend to feel much more authentic and raw, as they are the vision of a single auteur, or a like-minded group who are all set on their core concept. Celeste, Hollow Knight, Tunic, Hyper Light Drifter, Undertale, Balatro, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Braid – all of these smaller titles are considered some of the greatest games of all time, and yet, the combined budget and team size of all of those titles will be just a fraction of a fraction of the size of Grand Theft Auto VI‘s.

The indie scene is typically seen as a more budget offering, with most titles sitting around the £20 mark, and many more being offered for much less. Multiplayer indie games like Among Us, Peak and Content Warning are all less than £10 each, and sit comfortably in that impulse-buy price range that you can just buy without a second thought, and hop into a session with friends.

Again, none of the titles I have mentioned in this section are hyperrealistic open world games with ray tracing or lifelike physics. But they don’t need to be – that’s not what everyone wants. Many people simply want a core gameplay experience that is complete and enjoyable, with a focus on expressive art style rather than realism for realism’s sake.

Sales & Freebies

As physical releases slowly but surely become collectors items and enthusiasts preferences rather than the main form of distribution, players increasingly look to digital storefronts for their games. Buying new games upon release is generally be expensive, but patient customers can often find digital sales slashing prices enormously, or giving games away absolutely free. As digital storefronts eliminate the manufacturing, material and delivery costs associated with physical games, they can afford to sell titles at much steeper discounts than we used to see historically. Steam sales are renowned for offering incredible value, particularly during their annual Winter Sale, and the likes of Loaded (previously CDKeys) sell excess game keys for digital titles across a variety of storefronts at a fraction of their original cost. Epic, in their attempt to compete with Steam, throw weekly games at their customers, to keep, for free. I myself have over 20 games in my Epic library and have paid for none of them, and I intend to keep accepting whatever freebies are thrown at me, because why wouldn’t I?

If you know where to look, and you’re vigilant with wishlisting titles, waiting for sales, and generally shopping around, you can often find titles for literal pennies that would have once cost you upwards of £40.

Final Thoughts

I believe that the days of enormous studios funnelling billions of dollars and years upon years worth of development time are numbered. There will still be behemoths like Rockstar who produce once-a-decade hits like GTA, but the process has become too gargantuan to be sustainable. Only sure-fire hits and established franchises are seen as worthwhile investments for these huge corporations, and we have seen time and time again that it is often the little guys, the free-to-plays, the live services and the viral hits which are providing the most value for money for players. Indie darlings are routinely kicking ass, scoring awards and dominating the discourse, as old-school dinosaurs and once-loved series are increasingly being left in the dust.

Gaming is a very fast-moving industry, dominated by technological advances and society at large. The very existence of budget titles, indie studios and fun-focused multiplayer experiences all feel like rebuttals and responses to the expensive, bloated nature of “Triple-A” releases, and as both development and distribution become easier and less expensive, we will continue to see more of these smaller projects which seem to connect more deeply with people as creative visions rather than projects by committee. And if they continue to offer people excellent value for money, they will choose these games over the more expensive competition.