We’re talking about Microsoft’s first game, which will cost $80 instead of $70.
Brandon Adler, the director of The Outer Worlds 2, offered the most sensible and sympathetic explanation from a developer’s perspective for the $80 price tag of the game. He essentially apologized, saying it wasn’t his decision. This is what Adler told GamesRadar during Summer Game Fest: “We’re a game developer. We love making games. We don’t set the prices for our games. Personally, as a game developer, I wish everyone could play my game because that’s what I want out of this whole thing. But you’d have to talk to the Xbox folks about the $79.99 price point,” Adler said.
The pricing issue is on everyone’s mind, with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the upcoming Borderlands 4 also pushing the price up to $80. Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford‘s explanation has already been reported. Due to labor issues in the gaming industry and the ongoing jobs crisis, the human and financial costs of game development have become a major topic of discussion. Games are difficult and expensive to make, yet prices have largely failed to keep pace with inflation. Some argue that the price of N64 games would be well over $100 in today’s market, so a price increase to $70 or $80 is modest.
According to a 2015 report by the Economic Policy Institute, wages have stagnated over the past 50 years. Homeownership is becoming increasingly out of reach in many countries, and rising rental costs, healthcare debt, and student loan debt are placing an enormous financial burden on people. Meanwhile, consumer electronics are more affordable than ever. PCs and monitors, for example, are much cheaper than they were three decades ago. Gamers also have more affordable gaming options thanks to subscription services, Steam sales, and the ongoing indie renaissance. Older, cheaper PC hardware (including the Steam Deck) can sustain hobbyists for much longer than before, alleviating the ridiculous GPU lag to some extent.
This is all an extension of some of the major underlying problems of the industry’s layoff crisis, such as the increased cost of making AAA games, the tendency to boom or bust within a month of release, and industry leaders’ consistent failure to account for these developments. If the buying public is not interested in spending $80 on a game due to the above factors, it is not a moral failing on their part; rather, it is a strategic and planning failure on the part of publishers, studio executives, and other high-level decision-makers. It’s not our problem if someone high up in management decides to invest millions of dollars and years of work into a game we don’t want to play.
Obsidian’s strategy of dividing its approximately 300 employees to work on several smaller projects simultaneously has resulted in an unprecedented level of productivity during a time of increasingly lengthy development periods and widespread layoffs. This has led to more reasonable prices for Pentiment ($20) and Grounded ($40), but Avowed costs $70. The price tag for The Outer Worlds 2 may prove to be a liability, although we have no idea how Microsoft determines sales success or failure.
Judging by the number of Steam reviews, 8860 user ratings for Microsoft‘s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle seems low for such a prestigious game from the beloved MachineGames studio. However, it appears to have “sold well” when considering console sales and Xbox’s estimated 35 million-plus Game Pass subscribers. Microsoft does not publish player numbers or other metrics for individual games on consoles or the service.
Source: PCGamer, GamesRadar, EPI
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