The price of a video game can be a decent sized hurdle for most consumers. Not every enthusiast has the disposable income to purchase every game that graces their wish list. This holds especially true now that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo — the “Big Three” console manufacturers — have all started selling their flagship games at the $69.99 MSRP. Heck, some third-party publishers have joined the $70 bandwagon, with even a few PC games clocking in at the cost of a week’s worth of groceries, or one and a half top-ups at the petrol (depending on your vehicle size).
But I’m pleasantly surprised to report that some titles are bucking this trend.
Cities Skylines 2 (which offers 9 unique pre-order building assets) is a reasonable $49.99. The upcoming sequel to Remnant: From Ashes — the aptly titled Remnant 2 — is also only asking you to shell out $49.99 to secure a copy. But perhaps the most baffling of all is Fort Solis, the sci-fi space horror game starring Roger “Arthur Morgan” Clark, which is currently only priced at $34.99 on Amazon and Walmart.
Now, there isn’t much info on Fort Solis to know whether this will be a shorter experience or a more robust one. So perhaps this price point will make more sense as we get closer to launch.
My point is that, just when it started to feel like taking out a second mortgage was the only alternative to playing more than a couple games per year, suddenly it seems like a more reasonable price of entry might be in the cards — at least for some games.
This led me to wonder if maybe the negative backlash for the $70 sticker price is contributing to a drop in game sales. Maybe this has even sparked a realization (from the more consumer-friendly publishers, anyway) that you don’t need to charge more upfront (for possibly fewer units sold) just because everyone else is doing it. You can just ask what you feel the game is worth and perhaps reap the windfall from potential fence-sitters that were waiting for a deal — and maybe those fence-sitters are more motivated to buy in at a comfortable launch price.
This could, of course, just be a confluence of several appropriately priced mid-tier games all landing in front of me at once, rather than an indication of where the industry as a whole is moving. After all, the PC port of Ratchet and Clank – Rift Apart — a game that originally released back in June of 2021 on the PS5 — is priced at $59.99, while the upcoming Starfield is currently still asking potential users to hand over $69.99 if they want to reach for the stars.
Nevertheless, even if it is only relegated to a handful of mid-tier games, seeing lower, sensible price tags is always a nice sight to behold.
