Are Video Games More Expensive Than Ever? GTA VI's $80 in Real Dollars

Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on November 19, and Rockstar Games’ June 2026 press release puts the standard edition at $79.99 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Eighty dollars for one game sounds like a record, and the price history since 2005 seems to agree. Count the dollars a different way, though, and GTA VI ends up at the bottom of the list.

The staircase since 2005

The case for “more expensive than ever” is easy to build. In October 2005, Call of Duty 2 launched on PC at $49.99, the standard price for a big game at the time, according to a 2020 report in The Ringer. A month later the same game arrived as an Xbox 360 launch title at $59.99. That $59.99 became the familiar price of a new console game, and it stayed there for years.

The next step came with the next consoles. Sony’s PS5 launch post on PlayStation.Blog in September 2020 priced Demon’s Souls at $69.99. In April 2025, Nintendo of America listed Mario Kart World for the Switch 2 at $79.99. GTA VI now matches it, and Reuters wrote in June 2026 that the price makes it “one of the most expensive base versions of a top-tier game.”

Ten dollars, then ten more, then ten more. Read that way, game prices only climb. But the staircase starts in 2005, and every step on it is counted in a different year’s dollars. There is also an older price tag, from before the staircase begins, that doesn’t fit it at all.

Fifteen years of the same $59.99

Start with the flat stretch in the middle. In October 2020, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War still cost $59.99 on PS4, The Ringer reported, the same tag Call of Duty 2 carried on the Xbox 360 in 2005. For fifteen years the number on the box did not move.

The money behind it did. The US consumer price index for urban consumers (CPI-U), published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, averaged 195.292 in 2005 and 258.811 in 2020. Say you paid $59.99 for a new game in 2005. Converted into September-2026 dollars using that year’s average prices, it comes to about $103.50 today. Say you paid the same $59.99 in 2020 instead. That is about $78.10 in today’s money.

So the real price of a new $60 game fell by about 24.5% over those fifteen years, roughly a quarter, while the tag stayed exactly where it was. It also means that by 2020, a $60 game was already worth less in today’s dollars than GTA VI’s $79.99. Year by year, the real value of that frozen tag slid under GTA VI’s price around 2019 and kept going.

If a fixed price can shrink that much in fifteen years, a price from the 1990s should look very different once it is converted. Those prices are on record, printed in an old magazine.

What GamePro printed in the 1990s

GamePro magazine listed a price in its review boxes, and scans of its issues are preserved at the Internet Archive. The May 1993 issue reviewed Bubsy on the Super Nintendo at $69.95. The May 1995 issue listed Spider-Man, also on Super Nintendo, at $74.95. In October 1996, GamePro gave Super Mario 64’s suggested retail price at the US Nintendo 64 launch as $69.95.

These are three individual cartridges from one magazine, not an average of every game sold in the 1990s. They are, however, real list prices that a shopper would have seen at the time, which makes them a fair comparison with a list price today.

Five dollars more, thirty-one years later

Put all eight list prices on one chart without any adjustment, and GTA VI’s $79.99 is the highest of the eight, tied with Mario Kart World. Yet it is only $5.04 above the 1995 Spider-Man cartridge. That is five dollars more, thirty-one years later.

Over the same stretch, everything else got more expensive much faster. The BLS consumer price index stood at 152.2 in May 1995 and 336.94 in September 2026, the latest month published. US consumer prices rose 2.21 times in that period, while the game tag rose by a few dollars.

In today’s dollars, GTA VI comes last

Now convert each list price into September-2026 dollars, using the CPI-U for the month each game came out, and the order flips. The 1995 Spider-Man cartridge comes to about $166. Bubsy, from 1993, is about $164. Super Mario 64 is about $149. In real terms, Spider-Man cost 2.07 times what GTA VI does.

The 1990s are not the only ones above it. Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360, measured at November 2005 prices when it launched, is about $102 today. Demon’s Souls, at November 2020 prices, is about $90.60. Even Mario Kart World, at the same $79.99 in June 2025, is about $84 now. Sorted by today’s money, the eight games line up like this:

Game	Launch	List price	In September-2026 dollars
Spider-Man (Super NES)	May 1995	$74.95	$165.92
Bubsy (Super NES)	Apr 1993	$69.95	$163.67
Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)	Sep 1996	$69.95	$149.36
Call of Duty 2 (Xbox 360)	Nov 2005	$59.99	$102.29
Demon’s Souls (PS5)	Nov 2020	$69.99	$90.62
Call of Duty 2 (PC)	Oct 2005	$49.99	$84.56
Mario Kart World (Switch 2)	Jun 2025	$79.99	$83.56
Grand Theft Auto VI (PS5, Xbox Series)	Nov 2026	$79.99	$79.99

GTA VI’s two numbers are the same because its price is already in current dollars; September 2026 is the latest CPI month available. The caveat from before still applies: the 1990s rows are three cartridges, not the whole market. But on this chart, the pair that matters is clear. From the Spider-Man cartridge to GTA VI, the tag went from $74.95 to $79.99, and in real terms the price fell by about half. The video walks through each conversion step by step if you want to see the bars move.

Why $80 still feels like a record

If the real price fell, the feeling that games keep getting pricier needs another explanation. One candidate is simple: the tag is the only number we see, and since 2005 the tag on the biggest games has only stepped up, from $59.99 to $69.99 to $79.99. Each step is a visible, round jump, while inflation works quietly in the background.

In today’s money, GTA VI’s $79.99 is close to what a $59.99 game bought in 2020 is worth now, about $78.10. Read that way, the new tag looks less like a new high and more like the old sixty dollars catching up.

The larger numbers have moved elsewhere. Rockstar’s press release prices the GTA VI Ultimate Edition at $99.99, $20 above the standard edition. And the list price is not what everyone pays. NPD data cited by The Ringer in 2020 put the average sale price of new games over their full life, including later price cuts, at roughly $40, flat since 2012.

What changes once you see it

A price tag is a number in one year’s dollars, and comparing tags from different years without adjusting them compares different units. On list prices alone, GTA VI ties for the top of this chart. Converted with the consumer price index, it sits at the bottom, below cartridges that cost about twice as much in real terms. Next time a price tag sets a record, it is worth asking which dollars it is counted in.