• Source: For nominal prices I used various sources. The price of recent games is easy to find on Wikipedia, older games oftentimes varied a lot in price so I resorted to finding catalog screenshots from the 90s and parsing through posts on forums from the 2000s. It may well be the case that the nominal price you paid for Mario Kart games in the 90s varies by ~10 USD one way or another. I then ran the numbers through an inflation adjustment tool with July 2025 USD as the baseline. This site was also quite useful although it most certainly underestimates the nominal price of the 90s games: https://gamerant.com/mario-kart-game-launch-price-adjusted-inflation-difference-increase/
  • Clickable source for real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
  • Tool: R, ggplot2

Posted by provoking-steep-dipl

18 comments

  1. The truth hurts so much. I’ve bought new AAA games for $50 no more than… What felt like… A couple of years ago?

    I’m getting old.

  3. Thank you for posting this Jesus. For some reason gamers think all game developers should make 750k/year and all video games should be free. We are lucky where we are right now, games are more expensive than ever to make and relatively unchanged in price.

  4. This is such a confusion graph to read. Literally just putting price adjusted for inflation would be better. 

  5. What is better Mario Kart or Sonic Racing CrossWorlds?

  6. Yeah but this isn’t representative of spending power as such, mario kart may have stayed more or less equal in respect to inflation since 2014 but wages have not increased at the same rate as the inflation, so people have less comparative disposable income.

  7. In 2001 a top notch AAA game cost $50

    My Xbox titles mostly cost 50

    24 years of inflation puts you at $80

    Yeesh…I feel old

  8. Games should be $100+ by now. There is no commodity in existence besides maybe GPUs and consoles where the consumer simultaneously demands that the product get better with each new iteration *AND* expects the price to remain the exact same for years.

    We sat on $60 for nearly two decades. That’s wild.

  10. People get so mad at me whenever I say that games are better and cheaper now compared to when we were kids. I know “better” is subjective but to me it’s so obviously true.

  11. I remember paying $60 for games in the early 90s, which was so much money back then, especially for a child. So many chores done for one game bought because the cover looked cool and a magazine said it might be good…

  12. That’s just generally true that games 30 years ago were SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive. As a teen having to save up 60-70 CAD$ for a game was a lot when I was making like 5-6$/h. Now games are about 90 CAD$ with the minimum wage over 15$/h.

    Went from like 10h of minimum wages work to 6h of work to buy a full price game. Which totally matches your graph.

  13. I thought it was odd games were $60 for so long. I wish they just would have incrementally increased prices like $5 instead of raising them $20

  14. I don’t get people defending price increases in video games back then. Create the game, make the cartridges or CDs, boxes, transport them to the store, and then sell them to the customer. Now most games are digital. It’s so much easier and cheaper to sell games now.

  15. Salary growth outpaced inflation WHERE?

    Also, at what price was the game sold? I bought Mario Kart 8 and got another full game packaged with it, Nintendo run a big promo.

  16. Salaries didn’t rise with inflation, so can we please cut that crap.

  17. I have no problem paying $80 for a game as long as I’m getting $80 worth of quality out of a game.

  18. Now do games made by KOEI in the SNES era. Expensive as all hell in the US. Like $90 for an import of Liberty or Death, etc.

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