The Future of Affordable Gaming

Imagining brighter horizons for the video games industry

TIGHTENING THE BELT

I’ve got to be honest: when I quit my crappy job this past April and decided to live off of my 2024 tax refund until further notice, I was more than a little anxious. It’s not called “immiseration” for nothing, after all. But a couple of months down the line from that fateful decision, I can say with confidence that I made the right choice. For one thing, I think the extra mental bandwidth is reflected in higher-quality output for The Spieler and a concomitant improvement in our performance. More importantly, though, learning to eliminate all but the most necessary expenditures for the first time in my life has taught me a whole shitload about what really matters to my happiness and wellbeing.

I tell you all of this in order to morally balance the following statement: video games are expensive as hell, and I’m only just beginning to properly internalize that. I paid sixty bucks for Baldur’s Gate 3 less than two years ago, which felt relatively affordable at the time but which would now be an unthinkable extravagance on my budget. It doesn’t help that 2025 has been well above average for video games thus far, seeing the launch of at least a dozen commercial titles I’d love to play but that I can’t justify privileging over food. And now that global supply chains are little more than a fleeting memory of days long past, I don’t even want to think about my rapidly aging PC hardware. So until circumstances improve, the only thing to do is to keep nose to grindstone and repeat the mantra of the latter Millennials: “If I keep working hard, then surely I won’t be broke for much longer!” I’m sure it’ll come true any aeon now.

In the meantime, I’m keeping myself occupied by playing older games, reading, writing, and fantasizing about a games industry in which things were sort of okay. I’d like to share some musings on the latter with you this week.

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A little less than two weeks ago, I chanced across an article on PC Gamer about the $80 retail price of upcoming RPG The Outer Worlds 2. Much hay has been made about the AAA games industry’s relentless quest this year to drive up the price of new games, and it was sobering to hear that the artists responsible for producing TOW2 had no say in how their work would be distributed. But for me, the article’s most provocative statement came as part of a personal aside on the author’s part:

For me, personally, the "normal" price of a game is $20-$30 at this point, and $40 is a stretch. The only ones I'd be willing to shell out $60 or more on would be hotly-anticipated releases from favorite studios.

-- Ted Litchfield for PC Gamer, 14 June 2025

I had never thought very hard about it, but those figures seem roughly in line with my own feelings. That strikes me as worth analyzing. Sixty dollars, which is now twenty to thirty percent cheaper than the de-facto standard price of premium releases, feels like a lot for a video game but isn’t really that much in the grand scheme of entertainment media. It’d buy you at most three or four new movies, which serves to emphasize that certain video games can be a terrific value proposition — if you get dozens or even hundreds of hours of high-quality entertainment from the bargain, then a higher pricetag seems eminently justifiable. Is $70 really all that different? What about $80 or $90? Hell, some folks will sink a thousand-plus hours into GTA VI. Why not charge a hundred?

Well, the cracks begin to emerge as soon as one looks at actual consumer behavior. At time of writing, the most popular game on the planet is a free-to-play Roblox-based light gardening sim, and I’m not sure I could even contrive a more hilarious metaphor for the dreary state of the big-money games industry. The entire scene has been coughing up blood for years now, and the wet hacking noise emanating from its turgid gullet is beginning to sound more like a death-rattle than a cough. High performers are still being laid off. Successful studios are still being shuttered. Player retention rates are still plummeting. And all the while, the public is becoming increasingly conscientious about the industry’s excess. People are noticing that premium games are shittier than they used to be, and marginally improving the graphics every few years hasn’t been enough to distract from it. Gamers aren’t morons, and what few of us are willing and able to regularly fork over an extra 25–30% will not represent the critical mass of ongoing consumer support that the industry will need to sustain this growth-at-all-costs farce much longer.

But none of this is to cast aspersions on the video games industry at large. The sub-AAA space is arguably doing better than ever. Double-A titles with smaller budgets are becoming critical darlings and dominating the sales charts, all while drawing eye-watering profit margins that prove the commercial viability of smaller-scale development. The Indies are also on a straight-up killing spree of late — speaking in market-relative terms, I think it’s fair to say that the most earnestly hyped and successful games of the past few years have all been non-corporate products made by small teams or even solo devs (Valheim, Vampire Survivors, Balatro…).

I understand the argument that AAA development paradigms are unsustainable without price-hikes and, since the industry’s decision-makers are largely in thrall to non-gaming shareholders, it’s probably true from a certain perspective. But the games themselves are worse and the people making them are suffering — in what sense is this incarnation of the industry even worth saving? The era of $90 games is upon us, but I cannot imagine it will remain sustainable for long. In light of that, let’s do some reflecting about the future of video games as a commercial enterprise.

AA RESURGENCE / THE “TRIPLE-I” STUDIO

I can’t stop thinking about this year’s Expedition 33: Clair Obscur, which is noteworthy on account of my not having played it yet — fifty bucks isn’t much more affordable than sixty. But that’s precisely what makes it so interesting to talk about: its team was confident enough in their results to compete at a thoroughly double-A retail price, and has by all accounts succeeded in dramatic fashion with 3.3 million sales and counting. And as if becoming a runaway commercial success out of practically nowhere wasn’t enough for them, they seem to have managed it all on a low-eight-figure budget for a profit margin that I’m sure has a lot of characters in the AAA space nervously refreshing their inboxes. Additionally, a remarkably durable consensus has formed around the game being very good on top of these other plaudits.

This is all deeply encouraging. Expedition 33 is just the latest batch of undeniable evidence that smaller budgets and shorter development cycles are fiscally viable strategies for competing in the splintered, hemorrhaging video games market of 2025. That said, eight figures over four years is still extraordinary by historical standards, and one can’t help but wonder how far the dial could be turned. Could Expedition 33’s success signal a forthcoming era of so-called “triple-I”¹ games made by small but highly ambitious teams of shareholder-independent designer-developers? I suppose it’s too early to say, but I would be pretty okay with that if so.

I’ve also had my eye on The Alters, the latest offering from 11 Bit Studios. Previously best known for This War of Mine, possibly the most depressing game I have ever personally played, 11 Bit showed up this month with almost no fanfare and dropped one of the most compelling ludonarrative concepts in recent memory — this premise of the protagonist cloning himself in order to compensate for his personal weaknesses reminds me of Disco Elysium in tantalizing fashion. It’s a little early to pass judgement about The Alters’ financial performance, but I have every reason to believe that it’ll be another remarkable success for this segment of the industry. The throughline connecting it to Expedition 33 is its supposedly (again, haven’t played either yet) excellent writing and art direction, both of which are justified and reinforced by core gameplay. Both games are works of art in their own right, and both are significant contributions to the dignity of video game design as an artform.

I think double-A/triple-I game development represents the best chance for a return to stability where professional game design is concerned. That the big-money industry is rapidly deprofessionalizing is no longer in serious doubt, but the reasons behind that shift are less to do with the intrinsic character of enterprise game design and more to do with the unsustainability of nine-figure development. I can just about imagine a medium-term future in which the countless thousands of AAA layoffs are eventually compensated for by a resurgent AA industry. If the demand for games of an Expedition 33 scale continues apace, then it follows that we’ll see a lot more mid-sized studios employing a few dozen people each. It may or may not be enough to rescue the moribund industry on its own, but this resurgence luckily isn’t the only positive development on the horizon.

INDIE APOTHEOSIS

That Indie games are undergoing a new renaissance of mainstream popularity is obvious, even if you don’t count that Roblox gardening sim. There was a time not long ago when we’d see two or three noteworthy independent releases per year, and those were often highly experimental with at-best niche appeal. Now it’s more like a dozen per month, and some of them are outselling hundred-million-dollar titans. The only question I have is just how far this trend will go before we observe some kind of reversion-to-mean. If the AAA industry sticks to its guns and makes good on its promises to normalize the $80–90 pricetag, it will all but certainly bleed a significant percentage of its existing base of core consumers who will ultimately buy fewer or no premium-priced games per annum. Since double-A titles aren’t that much less expensive, it only makes sense that cheap and even free indie titles will soak up this audience. What else are folks gonna do? Get a second job just to afford GTA VI and the hardware to play it on?

No, of course not. They’ll get a second job so that they can keep buying groceries, and then come home and boot up a cheap new Indie game or a AAA classic from ten to twenty years ago. Nintendo will probably continue to shift hardware and the occasional first-party IP refresh, but it still enjoys privileged access to a large and international cohort of salaried professionals who will pay through the nose to satisfy their children and/or their own nostalgia. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but it hardly sounds like a durable business strategy. Even that much is better than can be said of other major industry players. Their mainstream credibility is evaporating, which is all one can really expect when one prices out the mainstream altogether.

And on the subject of industry credibility, I think it must be the case that customer satisfaction is much higher on average within the Indie sector. People love playing great games, and they especially love when those great games are significantly cheaper than they’re used to paying. This is becoming straight-up common in today’s market, and only one thing can happen when one’s competitors sell a superior product at a lower price. The “standard” price of video games as understood by the gaming public will all but necessarily cease to be defined by the AAA market. Instead, it’ll be understood as the average price of high-profile sub-AAA releases.

It really makes you wonder: just how low could we go? To this point, I’ve written under the assumption that the commercial video games industry isn’t going anywhere and that it will be sustained at all levels by paid digital distribution for the foreseeable future. But this isn’t really the horizon I have in mind for my favorite artistic medium, so why don’t we make like philosophers and try to imagine an altogether better tomorrow?

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: GAMES ARE ART. WHAT IF THEY WERE FREE?

I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2020 and have continuously lived in the area since then. It hasn’t been a particularly jolly place to recreate these past five years, but it gets one thing absolutely right: support for the arts. I can, essentially on a whim, decide to show up at any Smithsonian museum and avail myself of its collections free of charge. I’ve encountered some of my favorite artwork of all time by so doing. An afternoon spent at the Hirshhorn followed by a stroll through the Sculpture Garden at no personal cost feels like an expression of utopian abundance straight out of a Gene Roddenberry screenplay — if such a thing can exist in real life despite all of the chaos and strife going on outside, why can’t we have more of it elsewhere?

Here’s the nutty thing about public support for the arts: taxpayer-supported public art initiatives are essentially government handouts paid to some of the least classically productive members of society, and yet these measures tend to be overwhelmingly popular even in times of hardship². I bring this up to underscore the fact that artwork is not necessarily commodified, and that it can be created and distributed without for-profit institutional support. We’re really not as helpless as the moneyed caste of enterprise slopmongers would have us believe, you know — we too are able to pool our resources and organize around shared goals. Premium video games sold as recreational products will continue to exist for as long as currency has value, but what would it take to separate out the artwork that manifestly doesn’t benefit from that arrangement? Or, put another way, how do we get the best and most important games into the hands of more people?

Well, the Smithsonian Institute can provide its valuable public services without charging said public largely because its funding is drawn from government grants (about $1 billion/year) and private donations (about twice that). They even incentivize the latter by carving big donors’ names in marble and holding opulent galas in their honor from time to time. And, although I’m sure there are any number of inefficiencies that could be improved, nobody save the most adamant philistines ever vocalize any problem with this state of affairs because we recognize public support of the arts as a common good. Civilized folk have done so for thousands of years, and have supported these initiatives by similar means for as long as the word “capital” has appeared in the same sentences as “artwork.” So, what then of video games as publicly valuable art? I get that we’re a ways off from erecting buildings in their honor, but there must be some means of meeting reality halfway.

The simple truth of the matter is that some video games truly do constitute great artwork and, assuming we’re on the same page vis-à-vis art being a public good, then “free” is by far the best price to charge for experiencing them. Why, then, should video games all be treated like recreational vices subject to sales tax and regulated exchange? Content creators and independent media groups already develop their own patronage networks and sponsor relationships to make sustainable livings off of covering video games even though that coverage is generally provided free of charge. Why can’t the same be true of making video games?

I think the lack of any committed structure like this is one of the last remaining barriers to the broad cultural acceptance of video games as artistic media in their own right. It’s apparent by now that simply releasing excellent games with high-art sensibilities is not sufficiently assertive to get the medium taken seriously — when you say “video game,” the average person off the street still thinks “Fortnite” or “Madden” rather than “Disco Elysium” or “Clair Obscur.” The next evolution in the industry’s artistic credibility will have to come from a structural change in the way video games are presented to the cultural mainstream. It’s one thing to celebrate teams that release excellent products at reasonable prices that enjoy tremendous commercial success, but quite another to stare down a skeptical public and say “we represent the twenty-first century’s greatest emergent artform, and we intend to prove it to you.”

I’m even more interested than usual in your perspectives. What’s the “normal” price of a game by your estimation? How do you imagine the future of the industry and its pricing structures? How about the future of video game design as a mainstream artform? Let me know downstairs.

Thanks for reading to the bottom! The E.Y.E review last week took a lot out of me, so I thought I’d take a little break from structured review-writing. Bigger plans for next week, though, and then I’ve got another tasty morsel of post-structuralist philosophy in the pipes for the week after. Stay safe out there, friends!

Til next time <3

1. I’ve seen this term batted around lately. I gather the “I” is short for “Independent,” although it begs the question of what the “A” in “AAA” stands for. “Avaricious,” perhaps?

2. If the Alliance of American Museums is to be believed, this attitude even transcends partisanship. They wrote a report about it back in 2018: https://www.aam-us.org/2018/01/20/museums-and-public-opinion/