Just a month and some change afterXboxannounced thatThe Outer Worlds 2would cost $80,Obsidianhas now informed players (through twokinda cringey meme posts on Twitter) that the upcoming titlewill now retail at $69.99. Xbox has also said that “full-priced holiday releases” will be set at that price point too, “in line with current market conditions”. This likely meansBlack Ops 7will also be priced at $70.
Funnily enough, Microsoft also cited “market conditions” whenannouncingits price hike, saying, “We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development.” That was a month ago. Market conditions havenotchanged all that much.
The Outer Worlds 2 Definitely Shouldn’t Cost $80
My colleague Jade King wrotewhen the $80 price tag was announced that hiking prices during a cost of living crisis was pretty hypocritical, considering The Outer Worlds 2’s anti-capitalist themes. The in-universe announcement from Obsidian felt like it was directly acknowledging those criticisms.
The tweet said, “As an organization devoted to making sure that corporations do not go unfettered, we at the Earth Directorate have worked with [REDACTED] to revise the price of The Outer Worlds 2. While this will not bring peace to the galaxy, or even your local colony, we assure you all that we are here to fight for all colonies in every way that we can.” Brother, that’s still a $70 game.
I’m not going to clown Obsidian too hard, though – this was clearly Microsoft’s decision, not the studio’s.Game director Brandon Adler himself said, “As a game developer, I wish everybody could play my game… You’d have to honestly talk to the Xbox folks.” The above tweet, while written in-universe, does seem to imply that Obsidian talked the publisher down on the price. Perhaps the argument was that The Outer Worlds 2 has explicitly marketed itself as a smaller game, making it a wholly inappropriate candidate for Xbox’s most expensive game to date.
Xbox Isn’t Beloved Enough To Be Raising Prices Like Nintendo
But I suspect there were a lot of other reasons Xbox decided to backtrack on this decision. It’s possible that in combination with the sales cannibalisation Game Pass inevitably causes, the high price of The Outer Worlds 2 caused soft pre-orders. This is all speculation, of course, since nobody has access to those numbers but Microsoft.
Thankfully, there’s only been one $80 Nintendo game so far. We’ll have to wait and see if upcoming games align with the $70 norm or attempt to push for a higher price point.
I’m generally sympathetic to smaller studios and publishers trying to recoup spiralling development costs with higher prices but Xbox is not a small publisher, it’s a corporation that makes trillions of dollars, and these prices are not competitive. I think games are a luxury, and that prices have not gone up in tandem with development costs, but people are just going to stop buying expensive games andmove further towards indie and double-A projects.
We need to be paring games down if they’re this expensive to make to match lower prices, instead of raising prices and expecting players to keep shelling out. Xbox is realising that it won’t be able to get away with it as things lie right now, but I’m sure its executives will try again some time in the future. After all, profit must go up.
