Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve have discovered the perfect scapegoat for their latest price increases: artificial intelligence, which apparently costs money to exist in the same building as a gaming console.
Xbox Series X now costs more. Switch 2 costs more. Steam Deck costs more. The justification, delivered with the confidence of someone who has never read an earnings call, is that AI infrastructure requires investment, supply chains are complex, and manufacturing is hard. None of these things are new. All of them have been true since before anyone trained a neural network on Reddit comments.
But here’s the thing: AI doesn’t actually power any of these devices in a way that would meaningfully increase production costs. The hardware is the same. The supply chains are the same. What changed is that executives realized they could say “AI” in a sentence and investors would nod knowingly while analysts published notes about “strategic market positioning.”
Why blame AI instead of just raising prices? Because “we want more profit margins” doesn’t play well in earnings calls. “We’re investing in AI infrastructure to remain competitive” does. It’s the 2026 version of “innovation costs money,” except innovation is now a chatbot that occasionally hallucinates product specifications.
The real innovation here is the price hike itself. Everything else is just marketing.