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Nintendo just charged $80 for Mario Kart World. GTA 6 may hit $100. The Witcher 4 cost $900 million to make. And a 30-person studio just made the best RPG of the year for $50.
Nintendo Just Moved the Goalposts
Mario Kart World launched on Nintendo Switch 2 at $79.99. No bundle. No discount. No apology. Nintendo, the company that historically priced below the competition and made it work through volume, has just set a new ceiling for first-party game pricing. And the industry is watching very carefully.
This matters because Nintendo doesn’t discount their first-party titles. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold for $59.99 for six years without a meaningful price drop. If Mario Kart World holds at $80, that price becomes normalised. And once normalised, every other publisher uses it as cover.
“The $70 standard lasted three years before cracks appeared. The $80 standard may last eighteen months. After GTA 6, we should all be prepared for the conversation about $100.”
Neal Lloyd — Gaming CornerExpedition 33 Just Broke the Narrative
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made by roughly 30 people at Sandfall Interactive. It sold for $49.99. It is currently one of the highest-rated RPGs of 2025, sitting alongside titles that cost forty times as much to produce. The gaming community has responded with genuine enthusiasm — not just for the game, but for what it represents.
This is the inconvenient data point that AAA publishers don’t want to address: the relationship between budget and quality has broken down. A $900 million game is not automatically better than a $15 million game. Players are beginning to understand this, and their purchasing behaviour is starting to reflect it.
The Expedition 33 Effect: Within weeks of release, Expedition 33 had won more “game of the year so far” designations than any title in 2025. Its award for best RPG was then stripped after AI art was identified in its assets — the irony of the most human-feeling RPG losing to an AI controversy is genuinely Shakespearean.
Who Wins and Who Loses
Publishers who can justify premium pricing through genuine value — deep content, long playtimes, technical achievement — will survive the transition. Publishers who charge $80 for games that feel like they cost $40 to make will face increasing resistance from a player base that has been burned too many times.
The $80 game is here. The $100 game is coming. The only question is whether the games being sold at those prices are worth it. Recent evidence suggests the answer is increasingly: not always.
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