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Gaming industry's $80 pricing strategy faces first major setback [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-07-31

The Great Nintendo Price Hike (I leave it to future historians to come up with a better name for this significant and extremely bizarre gaming industry moment) evidently hasn't been working out for everyone. Precious few actual $80 games have been announced or released thus far, but Xbox has walked back the only one on its docket, delaying their previous "challenging" decision to jack their first-party game prices up.

Look, I liked The Outer Worlds when it released back in 2019. Obsidian is an immensely talented developer (Pentiment is a masterpiece!) who's had precious few chances to play in the triple-A space, and while TOW was nowhere near as sprawling or as deep as the likes of Fallout: New Vegas, it was still a tightly-written bite-sized RPG in a fun setting.

Crucially, it was also immensely divisive critically and extremely short, so of course Microsoft decided to make its upcoming sequel their first full-fledged $80 game. Not DOOM, not the next Halo, the nice space RPG made by the niche RPG studio. This went exactly as well as one might expect, and Microsoft has already slashed the price to the now industry-standard but still eye-watering $70 in response to disappointing pre-order numbers.

Dear Galactic Citizens!We have received your SOS via skip drone about the pricing. 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. — Obsidian (@obsidian.net) 2025-07-23T14:02:33.084Z

In a time when money is tighter than ever, prices going up is not ideal. There is, of course, something to be said for Xbox using these price hikes as a means to funnel more people into getting Game Pass rather than buying games outright, but that won't be a viable option either given the ever-bloating budgets major publishers pump into their games. There's a reason Microsoft lost the console war so handily, it seems.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/07/31/gaming-industrys-80-pricing-strategy-faces-first-major-setback.html

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