The Trump administration has just implemented a new set of tariffs in the United States on goods coming from China, Canada, and Mexico, and analysts are warning gamers to expect these tariffs to begin impacting the price…and even availability…of video games, consoles, and other tech items.
The tariffs, which took effect on Tuesday this week, are essentially taxes placed on the cost of importing certain goods from the countries in question. In this case, the tariffs put in place include a 25% tax on almost all imports from Canada and Mexico, and 20% tax on goods from China. While it’s possible for companies in the supply chain to simply eat these costs, more often than not these taxes are passed onto consumers. Companies such as Target, Best Buy, Acer, and others have already warned consumers to expect prices on goods they sell to rise in the coming months as a result.
And unfortunately for gamers, rising prices are very likely to impact tech and gaming goods. As Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out on Bluesky yesterday, the tariffs on Chinese goods will impact video game consoles, smartphones, GPUs, laptops, and more, while the 25% tariff on goods from Mexico will impact phyiscal games.
What remains unclear is exactly how much this will impact prices. As Ahmad points out in a reply to the original post, some electronics manufacturers and sellers have been proactively taking action in anticipation of these tariffs by moving manufacturing to Southeast Asia. And computer parts were already being impacted by 10% tariffs from China, which began in February and have now increased to 20%. However, 75% of consoles imported to the United States are from China according to Ahmad. And there are still plenty of questions in the air as to how this will impact Nintendo’s upcoming new console, the Nintendo Switch 2, whose price has yet to be announced.
In response to Ahmad’s post, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella chimed in with another observation: it’s possible that we see physical games start disappearing from store shelves in response to the tariffs on Mexican goods.
In a separate post, Piscatella also pointed out that according to Circana’s 2024 US Gamer Segmentation Report, the US market has already been seeing downticks in gaming amongst younger players, in no small part due to gaming becoming more and more expensive a hobby.
“As gaming continues to get more expensive, and as prices in everyday spending categories increase, this trend isn’t likely to improve…As audience size retracts, the only way to get to growth is to get each remaining player to spend more. Of course, this is much more difficult to do as that same audience is asked to spend much more on everyday spending categories like food, shelter and utilities.
“Needless to say, making gaming products more expensive at the same time isn’t likely to help.”
We’ve already covered a number of other analysts warning about the impact of such tariffs on gaming back in February, when they were first proposed. At the time, even the Entertainment Software Association weighed in on the tariffs prior to their implementation, affirming concerns they would impact gaming consumers and the economy writ large.
While we don’t yet know the precise scale or breadth of the impact of these new tariffs on gaming, it doesn’t seem likely at all that gaming goods will get out of this new policy unscathed.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
