How Trump and AI Are Making Video Games More Expensive
▼ Summary
– Video game console prices have increased drastically since Trump’s April 2025 tariffs, with the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2 all seeing multiple price hikes.
– The AI industry has also driven up costs by causing a RAM shortage, as data center buildouts consume memory chips and raise prices across consumer electronics.
– Price increases are hurting Trump’s approval among young men, a key voting bloc he won in 2024, with only 32% of young male voters approving of his job performance in a December 2025 poll.
– The upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto VI in November will highlight inflated costs, with the standard edition priced at $80 and physical copies containing only a download code.
– A separate YouGov poll found that 34% of Americans named Trump the worst American of the past 250 years, far ahead of second-place Jeffrey Epstein at 14%.
The cost of playing video games is climbing fast, and two widely disliked forces are driving the trend: President Donald Trump and the artificial intelligence industry. This inflation is creating fresh political headaches for the Republican Party just ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Over the past 15 months, every major game console has undergone significant price increases. The shift began shortly after Trump announced his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025. Starting this August, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X with 1 TB of storage will cost $300 more than its original launch price of $499.99 in November 2020. This marks the console’s fourth price hike in that period. The first increase came roughly a month after Trump’s tariff announcement, with Microsoft citing “market conditions.”
In the days leading up to Liberation Day, the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry’s trade group, publicly opposed the administration’s plans. “Tariffs on video game devices and related products would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and would harm the industry’s significant contributions to the U. S. economy,” the organization stated.
Similar price jumps have affected Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Nintendo’s Switch 2. A standard PS5 with a disc drive now costs $150 more than at launch. The Switch 2, released only about a year ago, will see a $50 increase in September. Trump’s tariffs also drove up prices for Switch 2 controllers, certain Xbox accessories, and games. Even the original Nintendo Switch, more than eight years after its debut, got $40 more expensive last August. Nintendo attributed the change to “market conditions.”
Historically, game consoles become cheaper over time. The PlayStation 3, for example, cost $200 less less than three years after its 2006 launch,and offered double the storage. Today, gamers are paying significantly more for essentially the same hardware.
“The Trump administration’s 2025 tariffs sparked the first wave of price increases on video game consoles,” explained Wirecutter, a product-review site owned by The New York Times. While many electronics manufacturers secured exemptions, video game hardware makers did not. The countries where consoles are typically built, including China and Taiwan, faced especially high tariff rates.
But Trump isn’t the only culprit. Just as the Supreme Court struck down many of his tariffs, the AI boom triggered what some call “RAM-ageddon.” AI data centers are sprouting up across the country, consuming massive amounts of memory chips (RAM). As supply tightens, prices have soared. The shortage began in earnest last fall. The average price of two 16 GB sticks of DDR5-4800 RAM hovered around $100 last September, according to PCPartPicker. By this January, it had climbed past $400.
This crisis is raising costs across consumer electronics. Apple, for instance, is hiking prices on its computers and iPhones by hundreds of dollars. Data centers,and the AI technology they support,are widely unpopular. A May Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans oppose having a data center built in their neighborhood. Only 32% of Americans believe AI will have a primarily positive effect on society, according to a new YouGov survey.
These price hikes are part of a larger inflation crisis under Trump that is damaging his approval rating ahead of the midterms. The increases hit particularly hard among young men, a voting bloc Trump successfully courted in 2024. In 2020, he lost men ages 18 to 29 by 10 percentage points; by 2024, he won them by 1 point, per the Pew Research Center.
Now, many of those young male Trump voters are feeling the sting of inflation on one of their top hobbies. Only 32% of male voters ages 18 to 29 approved of Trump’s job performance, according to a December 2025 survey by HIT Strategies and the centrist group Third Way.
The inflated cost of gaming will get even more attention as the midterms approach. Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be one of the biggest entertainment releases ever, debuts on Nov. 19 at $80 for the standard edition,$10 more than typical new games. An “ultimate edition” with extras like exclusive in-game shops will cost $100. Adding insult to injury, physical copies of GTA VI won’t include a disc; you’ll only find a code for a digital download. (This will become standard for all new PlayStation games starting in 2028.)
Whether or not Trump remains the primary driver of rising gaming costs, he and the Republican Party could face voters’ anger over it. They might hear the same message Trump himself delivered in a cringey “Apprentice”-style skit at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo: “You’re all fired. Look, I’m sorry, it’s over. Get out.”
(Source: Dailykos.com)
