Global Cost of Gaming

Paxful

US

Creative/Outreach

Finance

3112

LinkScore Tooltip copy here
111

Linking domains

How much are you willing to spend on the latest games console? After its release in 2020, many people struggled to find a newly released PS5 in a store that wasn’t sold out – but in some countries the average-earning person struggled to afford one in the first place.

Working with Paxful, we ranked the cost of consoles vs average earnings around the world to find out just how accessible the biggest gaming brands are – and how the cost of gaming compares among prize-winning esports players.

Objectives

1. Achieve top-tier, authoritative, editorially valid links that increase site authority.
2. Increase organic search rankings to increase the client’s traffic.

Methodology

We began our research by finding the retail prices of the PS5 (digital edition), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S, and iPhone SE from various sources, including official brand websites and regional online stores. We also included the cost of a gaming PC, based on the cost of a Dell G5 Gaming Desktop with a GTX 1660 graphics card. Countries with no retail prices available for brand new products were excluded from our analysis.

Using average monthly salary data for each of the countries in our analysis, we found out how much the cost of each gaming gadget in our study represented, in terms of local monthly salary. This gave us not only the rankings of the most and least expensive places to buy a console, but the most and least affordable places to be a gamer.

We also put together a map revealing where in the world prize-winning esports gamers are most likely to come from, and how their gaming earnings compare to the local salary. We wanted to find out whether high console costs might be a barrier to rising to esports elitedom, but discovered quite the opposite: there are more prizewinning esports players in the top ten most expensive and most unaffordable (based on local salaries) countries to buy a games console than in the cheapest and most affordable countries.