Analyst: Trump Tariffs Could Lead to Fewer Physical Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 March 2025 / 3,624 Views
Executive Director & Video Game Industry Analyst at Circana (NPD) Mat Piscatella has stated that the new Donald Trump's tariffs could put physical games at risk.
Piscatella suggests the tariffs could lead to some publishers to skip physical versions of games altogether and only release games digitally.
"Very small piece of all this, but it wouldn't surprise me to see physical games that would be subject to tariffs simply not get made, with pubs moving to an all digital strategy,' said Piscatella in a response to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad on the tariffs. "What a mess."
Trump has imposed 25 percent tariffs on good imported from Mexico and Canada, and raised tariffs on China by 10 percent to being that up to 20 percent.
The vast majority of physical games in North America are produced in Mexico. This would mean a 25 percent increase on the price of physical games.
Very small piece of all this, but it wouldn't surprise me to see physical games that would be subject to tariffs simply not get made, with pubs moving to an all digital strategy.
What a mess.
— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 8:21 AM
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The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) in a statement last month said, "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."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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Nintendo made games should largely be unaffected. They print their game carts in Japan I believe. The Switch 2 console on the other hand might be affected by China tariffs, however I remember reading that Nintendo has moved a lot of hardware production to Vietnam.
I thought Nintendo moved a lot of their production from China to Taiwan. I don't know if Taiwan is also affected by the tariffs, but I don't think so.
Taiwan just announced a $100B deal with the U.S. However, Taiwan also insists that the U.S. will never get its most advanced technology, and Trump has threatened Taiwan with tariffs. They're also likely rethinking tying themselves to the U.S. too closely after seeing how Trump has completely cozied up to Russia against Ukraine. They're thinking that Trump can't be relied on to help if China decides to make a move.
The US can do what they want; their voters like higher prices etc apparently.
Not that you said otherwise, it should be noted: Prices will go up worldwide. The expected outcome of these tariffs will be businesses moving manufacturing plants outside of China, where labor may not be as efficient nor cheap. Not sure about the other two, but I do know that Nintendo has been prepping for this USA assault on China for the past several years, having opened up manufacturing plants with Foxconn in Cambodia and (some other country around that region…i forget the name).
Where it becomes tricky, however, is whether Trump will tariff the countries which businesses move to. From what I can tell, Donald is looking to “reduce trade deficits” (aka less imports, and thereby more goods made in America…where labor is nowhere near as cheap as in China). If manufacturing jobs do start moving back into America, then that’s a big problem for the rest of the world — including, though not to as great an extent as, America — as this means more expensive goods for everyone, as well as an America with even more leverage and control over countries worldwide. Likely being done so as to (further) strangle a developing China and Russia, if I were to guess.
…and that’s my political tangent for today lol.
The Republicans are also trying to destroy the labor protections in the U.S., and condition Americans to work for shit wages.
talk to me when dems reverse these anti-proletariate decisions. As far as I’m aware, this is bipartisan legislation.
Where are you getting your numbers? Are you averaging all tariffs across all countries by term? I'd love to see the source. I also haven't seen that Trump wants 25% on every nation--is that the same source?
I know that Biden dropped some tariffs, such as steel from Europe, but he added billions of dollars more in tariffs on Chinese and Russian products.
USA is too big of a market for businesses to not include. (GDP is an indicator of money flow, hence, America is where the money is at.) “[T]he rest of the world will just try and trade more with each other” disregards the fact that, if businesses do choose to operate manufacturing outside of America, they will be slapped with import tariffs on their most important market; whereas operating inside of America will avoid USA import tariffs. (Plus, most countries don’t have import tariffs placed against the USA. That’ll likely change with time, I’d presume, in response to USA tariffs, but as of the moment, the most profitable means to operate your business might just be to move manufacturing inside America.)
Look at the dislikes when someone speaks negative about Trump. Republicans are so funny.
The number of posts getting downvoted for being Anti-Trump is a fantastic example of why the supporter-based upvote/downvote system needs to go. Obviously, a majority of people across the world do not like Trump. Obviously, Trump supporters are paying for extra downvotes by supporting the site. Same goes for Anti-Xbox comments on Xbox articles. This makes it where the comment section doesn't reflect the site membership as a whole. And it rewards cult members and fanboys instead of allowing reasonable people to make good comments.
The whole upvote/downvote system in articles needs to go, it is trash, I saw a user a couple weeks ago get downvoted simply for saying they were looking forward to a videogame, they asked questions in their comment to try to generate discussion, only to be downvoted into silence.
The whole system discourages discussion, encourages cliques, and that is before we get into how it's bullshit that anyone who pays the site "deserves" a stronger voice than anyone else, I know we're desperate for money but c'mon. Nobody should have extra power simply because they tossed the site a few $.
Not to mention people actually made alts in the past to rig the system.
I don't believe downvotes will ever be used in a fair or reasonable manner, it's not just shitty comments that get downvoted. Originally the downvotes were mainly to hide spambots at the bottom of the page, or horrific comments, now it's just, everything and spambots are no longer an issue.
There's a lot of ways this site could improve that I think we would both agree on. Lots of social media these days is toxic in the ways that you described. I still come here from time to time because there's something fun about just a simple forum where people can talk. No algorithms. No nested comments. Just old school message boards.
The vast majority of tariff impacts can be avoided by simply importing the very low cost components - a case, a disc, and a liner - and then assembling those into the retail video game package within the US. Each of those components cost very little (pennies or a couple of dollars) so tariff impact would be minimal.
And this is the kind of thing you're likely to see happening. They're not going to start making every piece of these things inside the US. But there may be more final assembly and the like done in order to avoid significant impact from tariffs.
This is why you hear so much talk about things like cars, where even the components have very high costs. If a $5,000 engine is imported from Mexico, and hit with a 25% tariff, it now costs $6,250. So even if that's the only component that comes in from outside the US (it definitely is not the only one in most vehicles), it raises the cost to produce that car by $1,250. But in a theoretical case of something like a video game, where maybe the disc is pressed in Mexico, and sold to Microsoft at a cost of $1, tariff impact is only $0.25.
Trump already destroying the economy
Not really destroying it.... just causing higher prices and inflation and some job losses in the near term. Maybe in the long term (10-20 years down the line) it proves to be a smart move. The problem is, people don't like to suffer (here and now) for a possible gain, that far off. Also its likely he will either back down before it has any effects, or a new president comes along and does it instead.
"Buffett even suggested at the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting that if just 800 other companies paid the same amount in federal taxes, the entire country's tax burden would disappear:"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-cuban-proud-pay-275-233043781.html
How is it good in the long term? All he is doing is increasing taxes for the poor and lowering them for the rich.
Fuck Trump.
As next gen will likey be digital only (Xbox quite for sure- hardly anyone would deny that) this could even be another nail in the coffin for a PS6 DD. I don't know if it affects europe when they get everything from China/ Taiwan!?
Which absolutely has large publishers rubbing their hands together with glee. Though it wouldn't surprise me if they keep producing physical copies because it gives them an excuse to increase prices across the board, even on digital copies.
Sega made a ton of their carts in the US, and those were far more expensive to produce than discs. Perhaps others should as well?
Trump flushing America down the toilet!!!!
Time to do what us europeans did for decades before : Importing. USA people speak english, might want to import games from uk and australia. Might even get cheaper in the end.
See alphamb03 comment. Prices will go up worldwide as a consequence of tariffs, plus — not to mention — importing from EU would cost significantly more than purchasing from USA. The USD is the most powerful currency in the world, and so, prices tend to be lower in USA than in Europe, for instance.
Well, i don't know about that. I don't know who sells games in the USA, but here we can get games from the equivalents of wallmart, from what i know, for like 49 euros instead of 79, at release. So, except if such thing doesn't exist in the USA (we have our gamestop owned company here, micromania, which sells games at 79 at release, guess what, they're like dead already and they don't realize it, especially when we're litteraly buying games at carrefour for 49 at 200 meters in the space place), i can see the issue.
Then again, you're right, everything is based of USD, not euros. Our prices matches yours, so if yours go up, we might see the thing happening here (France) sooner or later. But you know, when pound was weaker years ago, all europe used to buy games at 30 pounds when it was 1 pound = 1euro. It didn't last long but when it worked, it was great.
Let's hope that we don't get 100 usd games too soon.
Even if publishers decided to add the full cost of the tariff to physical copies, that would be like an extra $10 a copy. That's still a good distance away from $100. I could see them instead spreading the cost out over all channels of distribution, perhaps raising physical and digital up to $75, which would actually make them a lot more money in the long run.
