Some new eye-opening data from Circana demonstrates the impacts of gaming hardware getting more expensive, as over half the households who bought gaming hardware recently made $100,000 or more a year.
More specifically, a post from Circana’s Senior Director Mat Piscatella on Bluesky revealed that 53% of households who bought new video game hardware, like the Nintendo Switch 2 or PS5 Pro, in Q4 2025 made more than $100,000 annually. In Q1 2022, only 40% of buyers were above that threshold.
Conversely, poorer households are buying less gaming hardware, as those making under $50,000 a year were just 19% of the buyers in Q4 2025, but they were 31% of the consumer base in Q1 2022. Essentially, this data shows that majority of consumers buying new hardware are from a smaller, richer base.
That tracks when you consider both broader economic conditions in the United States and the fact that gaming hardware has drastically gone up in price in recent years. The PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S all went up in price in 2025 despite buying nearly five or more years old.
New hardware like the Nintendo Switch 2 was more expensive at $450 as well, compared to the $300 the first Nintendo Switch originally retailed for. Circana estimates that the average price of video game hardware was $446 in Q4 2025.
As for the long-term effects of this, Piscatella wrote he is “expecting hardware prices to keep going up, for more premium targeted accessories to be made available, and for even more creative ways of packaging games into fancy editions at higher price points.” Essentially, a smaller but richer console gaming audience will be buying more.
