Dominant
Premium price ceiling
The ceiling held on software but broke on hardware, and buyers responded by waiting. Very important for researchers tracking monetization, substitution behavior, or consumer resistance.
What is a premium game?
A premium game is one you buy once, like a book or a movie, and then play as much as you want without paying again. The alternative is a free-to-play game, which costs nothing to download and makes its money when players buy things inside it. The “price ceiling” is the most players have shown they’re willing to pay up front for a premium game.
Where it stands
GTA 6 launched at $80, settling speculation about $100 base games. Only Mario Kart World, GTA 6, and Elden Ring on Switch 2 have cleared $70 — Microsoft tried and retreated to $70 after backlash. Meanwhile a RAM-driven hardware crunch pushed consoles past $600 and GPUs, monitors, and memory sharply higher. Nintendo raised Switch 2 to $500 in the US, Canada and Europe from 1 September 2026 (Japan from 25 May), citing memory and component costs, and said the new price still does not cover build cost; it put the hardware-cost impact on FY2027 earnings at about ¥100bn. By September the crunch was moving both ways: Framework cut its LPCAMM2 memory prices retroactively while a 10 percent Intel CPU rise was reported for October and Chinese GPU prices rose again.
Further reading
The timeline, consequences and objections for this trend are not written yet. What it is and its reading list are above.