The threat of the first $80 video game loomed in the distance for months and was ultimately broken by an unlikely candidate in Nintendo. Regardless of which company took that initial leap, this price increase was always a matter of when, not if. I was one of the many who assumed GTA 6 would be the first game to raise the price, but it seems the industry needed to start flirting with a new standard sooner rather than later. While we haven’t heard Sony’s plans to increase any PS5 game costs just yet, Xbox didn’t wait long to announce that it was going to embrace this new price point as early as this winter on certain titles.
Well, that was the original plan, anyway.
The Outer Worlds 2 bore the unfortunate weight of being Xbox’s first $80 game for around a month before the decision was reversed and refunds were issued. While that is a minor win for us gamers, make no mistake — we are going to lose the war. $80 games are coming, and besides becoming more discerning consumers, we also need to start having better conversations about what makes a game worth $80.
Putting a price on art
I think it is important to recognize that having a standard price for art is weird. We all kind of accept it for games because that’s how it’s been after the N64 era when pricing became standardized. Ask any gamer who lived through those times — and was buying games with their own money — and they will gladly tell you about some games costing over $100 at launch. The advent of digital games and a growing indie and AA scene has provided a space for some games to explore the pricing scale, but the rule of thumb for “major releases” has always been the standard $60, $70, and soon-to-be $80 price tag.
And that’s just such an odd thing to do. It treats all games as a singular product rather than individual works of art. It simplifies the process of having a publisher somehow determine how valuable its own work is for the consumer, plus makes it far easier for budgets and projections, but has conditioned us to view games as products rather than art. We believe a game should cost $70, so a game that costs more had better be something spectacular, right?
Not everyone operates that way, but I think it has seeped into a lot of our thought processes when it comes to what games we invest in. Don’t get me wrong, we all should be highly conscious about what games we decide to buy at full price. $70 is already a huge investment for the majority of people, so taking advantage of sales, cheaper games, or even ways to get free games is only natural. But when we’re so accustomed to treating games as monetary investments, I think we start to lose sight of their primary value — art.
Almost every discussion about game pricing will include a portion of the community attempting to qualify whether a game is “worth” its price based on objective metrics. The main factor that never seems to die off is game length. I’m too exhausted to fully dismantle this argument, but if you’re reading this, I assume you don’t need me to. Basing any work of art’s value on its length has never held up to scrutiny. There are games I’ve beaten in less than two hours that I would pay way more for than games I’ve sunk 100+ hours into.
Length is about the only yardstick we can use to compare all games with. In that regard, it makes sense why some try to wield it as a tool to measure a game’s value. While I disagree with that wholeheartedly, I do have to concede that sometimes length is an important factor. However, it shouldn’t be talked about in isolation. We can’t stop the discussion at “X game is Y hours long, therefore it is/isn’t worth the price.” How are those hours spent? Does the game justify its short or long duration? The tricky thing here is that the answer is different for every person and every game.
Would The Outer Worlds 2 be worth $80? I can’t say. I think for some people it very much would be, but not for others. This is where the value in having trusted reviewers lies. Reviews (at least good ones) don’t view a game as a product and judge it as such. Instead, they should discuss the message the game is trying to communicate through its narrative and gameplay systems, and how successful or not it is in that. They should be subjectively examining its artistic merit and how it affected them. If you have a reviewer who shares your taste in games, or you at least trust to critique a game in a way that communicates whether or not you’d enjoy it, that’s the second best way to determine if a game is worth $80. The absolute best way is to play it yourself, but most of us can’t do that without paying upfront cost and hoping it ends up being worth it.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know if you will like a game before you purchase it. The feeling of spending $70 on a game only to be disappointed can be gut-wrenching, and the risk only gets higher when we talk about $80 games. It would be so much easier if there were a simple metric to know with certainty if a game was worth your hard-earned cash, but there simply isn’t. Games are art, and art is nuanced and deeply personal. I know times are tough out there and your dollars are more precious than ever, so I’m not suggesting you be careless. In fact, I’m asking the opposite. Let’s have deeper conversations about what makes a game worth $80 or not while also understanding that the answer is going to be different for everyone.
