The return of the $70 video game has been a long time coming - Ars Technica

But while $70 would match the high-water mark for nominal game pricing, it wouldn't be a historically high asking price in terms of actual value.

To measure how the actual asking price for console games has changed over time, we relied primarily on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers we found online.

To avoid the influence of low-priced bargain bin games or retailer discounts, we focused on the highest asking prices for individual games we could find in each year (collector's editions excluded).

While nominal cartridge game prices in the early '80s topped out at $30 to $40, inflation makes that the equivalent of $80 to $100 per game these days.

Nominal prices stayed relatively flat into the late '80s as the industry started recovering from the great crash, but inflation brought the actual value down a bit in constant dollars.

As the industry transitioned into 16-bit cartridges in the '90s, though, nominal prices for top-end games rose quickly past $60 in nominal dollars and $110 in 2020 dollars.

The late-'90s transition to disc-based games relieved a lot of the cost pressure on physical game production, which translated to generally lower prices for consumers.

Disc prices settled down to a more reasonable $49.99 soon after that, setting a functional nominal price ceiling that would remain until the mid '00s.

And that's the de facto ceiling that has remained in place to this day, even as digital downloads and the explosion of indie games has meant many titles now launch at well below this price.

Adjusting for inflation, we can see the actual (2020 dollar) value of top-end disc-based games plateaued right around $70 for almost a decade through in the '00s and early '10s.