{"id":745605,"date":"2026-07-06T01:47:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T01:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/745605\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T01:47:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T01:47:09","slug":"video-games-are-a-fortune-blame-trump-and-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/745605\/","title":{"rendered":"Video games are a fortune. Blame Trump and AI."},"content":{"rendered":"

Survey Says<\/a> is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that\u2019s driving politics or culture.<\/p>\n

Video gaming is getting more expensive, and two reviled entities hold much of the blame: President Donald Trump and the artificial intelligence industry. And such inflation is only bad news for the Republican Party ahead of this year\u2019s midterms.<\/p>\n

All three major game consoles have seen their prices increase drastically over the past 15 months, starting shortly after Trump announced<\/a> his wide-ranging \u201cLiberation Day\u201d tariffs on April 2, 2025.<\/p>\n

Starting this August<\/a>, Microsoft\u2019s Xbox Series X with 1 TB of storage will be $300 more expensive than it was when the console launched at $499.99<\/a> in November 2020. It will be the floundering<\/a> console\u2019s fourth price hike in that time. The first time arrived<\/a> about a month after Trump\u2019s tariff announcement, with Microsoft citing \u201cmarket conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In the days leading up to Trump\u2019s so-called Liberation Day, the Entertainment Software Association\u2014the video game industry\u2019s trade association\u2014published a statement<\/a> decrying the administration\u2019s plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cTariffs on video game devices and related products would negatively impact hundreds of millions of Americans and would harm the industry\u2019s significant contributions to the U.S. economy,\u201d the statement read.<\/p>\n

Over the past 15 months, similar price hikes have hit Sony\u2019s PlayStation 5 and Nintendo\u2019s Switch 2 as well. The price of a standard PS5 with a disc drive is now $150 higher than at launch, and the cost of the Switch 2, which was released only about a year ago, will jump by $50<\/a> in September. Switch 2 controllers and other accessories also got more expensive<\/a> due to Trump\u2019s tariffs, as did certain Xbox accessories and games<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even Nintendo\u2019s original Switch saw its price increase by $40<\/a> last August, more than eight years after its launch. The Japanese gaming giant chalked<\/a> it up to\u2014you guessed it\u2014\u201cmarket conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Historically, game consoles get cheaper with time. For instance, less than three years after its 2006 debut, the PlayStation 3 cost $200<\/a> less\u2014and had double the storage space. In other words, gamers got a better product for less.<\/p>\n

Now they\u2019re getting a pretty similar product for much more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s 2025 tariffs sparked the first wave of price increases on video game consoles,\u201d Wirecutter, a product-review website run by The New York Times, recently explained<\/a>. \u201cWhereas many electronics manufacturers \u2026 secured exceptions for their products, the makers of video game hardware didn\u2019t receive the same reprieve\u2014and the countries where consoles are typically manufactured, including China and Taiwan, were subject to particularly high tariff rates.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But Trump doesn\u2019t hold the blame by himself. Just as the Supreme Court struck down<\/a> many of his tariffs, the AI boom has caused \u201cRAM-ageddon<\/a>.\u201d AI data centers are getting dropped in neighborhoods across the nation<\/a>, a buildout that is gobbling up memory chips,<\/a> known as RAM. And as the supply shrinks, the prices have skyrocketed.<\/p>\n

The shortage began in earnest this past fall. The average price of two 16 GB sticks of DDR5-4800 RAM was around $100 last September, according to price-monitoring website PCPartPicker<\/a>. But by this January, it was over $400.<\/p>\n

The crisis is spiking prices across consumer electronics. For instance, Apple is raising<\/a> the cost of its computers and iPhones by hundreds of dollars.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn Amazon data center is seen towering behind homes in Stone Ridge, Virginia, in 2025.AP<\/p>\n

Data centers, as with the AI technology they support, are widely reviled. Seventy-one percent of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, according to Gallup<\/a> in May. And only 32% of Americans think AI will have a primarily positive effect on society, per a new YouGov poll<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But not only are these price hikes part of a larger inflation crisis under Trump, which is hobbling his approval rating ahead of this year\u2019s midterm elections, the increases are particularly felt among young men<\/a>, a voting bloc Trump successfully courted in 2024. In the 2020 election, he lost men ages 18 to 29 by 10 percentage points, but four years later, he won them by 1 point, according to the Pew Research Center<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, many of those Trump-voting young men are feeling the sting of inflation hit a top hobby, and they aren\u2019t happy. Just 32% of young male voters ages 18 to 29 approved of the job Trump was doing as president, per a survey<\/a> fielded in December 2025 by HIT Strategies and the centrist group Third Way.<\/p>\n

The inflated cost of gaming will be highlighted further in the days leading up to the midterms. Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be one of the largest entertainment releases in history, will debut on Nov. 19, at $80 in its standard edition, $10 higher than is typical for new games. An \u201cultimate edition,\u201d featuring extras like exclusive in-game shops, will come in at $100. Adding insult to injury, if you buy a copy of GTA VI in stores, the case won\u2019t contain a disc<\/a>. All you\u2019ll find is a code for a digital download. (Unfortunately, this is how all new PlayStation games will be<\/a>, starting in 2028.)<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether Trump is still the main reason for increasing prices in video gaming, he and his Republican Party could very well face voters\u2019 wrath over it. They might just tell the GOP, as Trump himself put it in a cringey \u201cApprentice\u201d-style skit<\/a> that played at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo, \u201cYou\u2019re all fired. Look, I\u2019m sorry, it\u2019s over. Get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any updates?<\/p>\n

Despite Trump\u2019s failure to give America a proper 250th birthday<\/a>, most Americans remain happy their nation isn\u2019t a monarchy, like the one it was part of before the American Revolution. A new YouGov poll<\/a> finds that 65% of Americans think it would\u2019ve been a bad thing for the U.S. to have its own monarchy for the past 250 years. Not as high as you might expect. Despite their alleged patriotism, Republicans (59%) are less likely than Democrats (75%) to say it would have been a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Minnesota is a blue state, but is it a progressive state? This year\u2019s Democratic Senate primary may test that idea, as progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and moderate Rep. Angie Craig square off. Recent polls are very much a choose-your-own-adventure. A new one<\/a> from Public Policy Polling and a pro-Flanagan group\u2014the Democratic Lt. Gov. Association, which she chairs\u2014finds her up 7 points over Craig, while another recent poll<\/a> from SurveyUSA and a group of local media outlets finds Craig up 5 points. One of the dividing issues between Craig and Flanagan has been healthcare<\/a>: Flanagan supports Medicare for All, while Craig prefers a public option.<\/p>\n

One year after Trump and the GOP gutted Medicaid<\/a>, a majority of Americans want the government to go full single-payer. In the latest Economist\/YouGov poll<\/a>, 52% of Americans support the creation of \u201ca national health plan in which all Americans get their health insurance from the federal government and private health insurance companies are eliminated\u201d\u2014a particularly blunt question wording that only highlights the appeal of a plan like Medicare for All. Even more impressive: Not only do 73% of Democrats and 54% of independents support such a policy, so do 30% of Republicans.<\/p>\n

After 1,592 days of trying to repel Russia\u2019s invasion of their homeland<\/a>, Ukrainians are sick of dealing with Trump. Just 7% of Ukrainians approve of the current leadership in the U.S., according to Gallup<\/a>. That marks a 59-point slide from its high of 66% approval in 2022, when Joe Biden was president.<\/p>\n

Vibe check<\/p>\n

Americans are divided over who is the greatest American of the past 250 years<\/a>\u2014but less so over who the worst is.<\/p>\n

YouGov asked<\/a> Americans to vote on the best and worst Americans since the nation\u2019s founding, devising the list of names from an open-ended question included in a previous survey.<\/p>\n

Eighteen percent named Abraham Lincoln as the best American, with George Washington (13%) and Martin Luther King Jr. (12%) close behind.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to the worst American of the past 250, 34% of Americans picked Trump. The second-worst, with a comparably low 14%, was accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Beyond simple recency bias, Americans also have more immediate experience with figures like Trump and Epstein, compared with Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Similarly, other more contemporary figures, like cult leader Charles Manson and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, had far smaller individual impacts on America than Trump.<\/p>\n

Who do you think is the greatest American since the nation\u2019s founding? Who\u2019s the worst?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[182,45898,254968,1281,1299,2211,562,1014,320117,320116,759,74,1298],"class_list":["post-745605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-datacenters","tag-donaldtrump","tag-microsoft","tag-nintendo","tag-playstation","tag-series","tag-sony","tag-surveysays","tag-switch2","tag-tariffs","tag-technology","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}