Over the past decade, the number of gamers worldwide has more than doubled. From PCs, consoles, to mobile, it feels like everyone has access to video gaming. However, there has been a noticeable jump over the past 10 years in the price to play the latest and greatest in gaming. 

Within the last year, two new game consoles have launched with next-generation hardware to play the newest games for years to come. But, even with this new technology in game consoles, some of the newest titles like Cyberpunk 2077 are not comfortably playable at higher resolutions and settings. So, to play the latest games and have them look great at the same time, what do you need?

Well, a high-end, top-of-the-line, gaming PC seems to be the most popular option. Two of the best-known, and most expensive, components in a PC are going to be the CPU and a graphics card. A CPU is often described as the brain of a computer because it performs the basic operations of the system, exchanges data with components, and manages the computer’s components. The graphics card in simple terms is what produces the images you see on your screen. It takes in data and then renders and displays high-quality, high-resolution, 3D images at fast speeds. These are pretty important functions for a computer, so that would explain the expense for them, but costing more than other components is not the problem, it’s the increasing prices for these components. Moreover, new games are continually demanding stronger graphics cards and CPUs each year. 

When comparing the highest-end graphics cards today to the ones that came out 10 years ago, an alarming trend starts to appear. Looking at the pricing by the major producers of gaming graphics cards, the price has swelled by over 75%. An example of this is the older AMD Radeon HD 6950 which would be $365 and the recent AMD Radeon RX 6800XT at $649. That is a pretty massive increase to see over just a 10-year period. Today’s top end cards at retail prices are already high, at $1,000 to $1,500, if this trend continues for the next ten years, prices could rocket up over an extraordinary $2,500. Furthermore, the prices of CPUs ten years ago to now have climbed by almost 50%. The AMD FX-8150 from 2011 priced at around $300 while the modern AMD Ryzen 7 5800x priced at $449 is an example of this. These worrying price increases have been obvious over the past few generations of products to consumers but show no sign of stopping. When I built my first PC in 2016, it was a mid-range computer, which was enough to really play anything very well. Now a mid-range PC costs a bit more than it did then, but the price for a high-end PC has increased exponentially. 

So, looking at the prices we have in the present day, a very high-end gaming PC is going to run you about $4,000 or more. To put that in perspective, that’s 5-6% of the yearly median income by U.S. households. This is not even including the cost for the games you are going to play, which for the average U.S. gamer is over $200 a year. Based on all of this, I think it’s clear that at some point soon high-quality, enjoyable gaming will only be done by those who are wealthier, and many will be stuck in the past. While this is obviously not an issue for people who can afford high-end gaming PCs, this will surely leave a bad taste in the mouths of many gamers and seriously hurt the growth of gaming as a hobby and the industry in the near future.