4d ago

Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming

www.windowscentral.com

Gaming @lemmy.zip

baatliwala @lemmy.world

3d ago

Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming

www.windowscentral.com /gaming/xbox/microsoft-concedes-that-the-outer-worlds-2-retail-price-was-too-high

Gaming @lemmy.world

cm0002 @lemmy.world

3d ago

Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming

www.windowscentral.com /gaming/xbox/microsoft-concedes-that-the-outer-worlds-2-retail-price-was-too-high

65 comments

$69.99
That's cool, I'll continue not buying your shitty, overpriced games!
If you happen to make a good one, maybe I'll buy the fully patched DRM free version with all the DLC for $5 in a few years.

Oh do these high prices mean they will hire more developers back after all of Xbox and Microsoft's cuts?
- Microsoft fired 15,000 people in the last year, and applied for 14,000 H1-B visa.
  They are cutting costs and improving productivity by taking advantage of people from other countries who have the threat of deportation hanging over their heads to keep them compliant.
  
  Good thing programmers were smart and organized into unions inspired by other industries instead of naively thinking they were too valuable to the ruling class in the US to be betrayed.
  ...
  
  The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken (or working exactly as intended, depending on how you look at it) though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want.
  It's not Microsoft's fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on "you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector" or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs...
- They lowered the price from $80 to $70, but I'm sure they'll fire more developers regardless
  
  Just as a little treat for themselves
- Any misstep, setback, or failure -> mass layoffs.
  If they have record breaking success and profits though, I think we'd see mass layoffs instead. v.v
  
  Damn, what a thin knife edge to walk, business majors are so smart!

The developers are already paid and are gonna get laid off regardless if game does well or not. You could give it away and I wouldn't bother to get it at this point. I hope MS rots.
- I just hope all the developers unionize. Microsoft is such a diverse company it's nearly impossible to boycott into any type of pressure. If firing one group could cause another team to strike it might at least slow them down.

I'm just glad my backlog of games is so long I'll never need to pay full price for a game again. These prices are too steep for me.
- This is the biggest factor for me now, too. Not to go all old man Millennial, but humor me for a second:
  I've been playing games since the NES era. The scene used to be a lot slower and while I never played every single game that came out or even owned every console, I was enough of a hobbyist that I could still follow all the major developments. These days, there's simply TOO MUCH. And I don't mean to imply that an abundance of choices is bad, just that it's an absolute firehose that no one person can follow. You have to dedicate yourself to your specific interests, your specific niches. These can well be served by indies and the whole back library of games.
  Because that's the other thing, we're starting to more thoroughly recognize games as art, as a library rather than as pure content. Unless you are absolutely committed to sucking on the end of that firehose to catch all the new content at its zenith, what's really the point?
  Fuck man, it's time to go back to the NES for me, pick up all those games I never beat as a kid and sink 10,000 hours into learning how to speedrun some of my favorites. There's simply no need to spend $70-80 fucking dollars on subpar, rushed, exploitative content. Fuck 'em.
  
  Definitely recommend playing or replaying old games. I've recently put hours into replaying Morrowind and Jedi Academy.
  The main game I've been playing lately is Mount & Blade Warband from 2010. Got it for a couple $ and have been loving it. I missed it when it came out and recently a friend had been talking a lot about how much fun it used to be.
  I have played a few newer AAA games that I uninstalled after a few hours. Sure there's some great new games, especially from small publishers or indie devs, but there's a lot more slop like you said.
  
  Trying to complete a Battletoads bike level is the only game you need. 😆
  
  It's not even "content at it's zenith" - AAA games nowadays are pushed out both expensive and broken, plus they come with the risk of some form of enshittification being sneaked in later (be it promised content that we're told "couldn't make it into the launch" being sold later as overpriced DLCs or even monetisation).
  I would say that the zenith of most AAA games (in the sense of peak enjoyment) is at least a year after release once most bugs have been fixed and the threat of enshittification has passed, sometimes never (for those games that did got enshittified).
  IMHO, the best value, not just in terms of fun-per-$ but also in avoidance of unpleasant feelings (such as feeling that you've been swindled by a game maker or are being taken advantage of) is in buying games which are at least 2 years old, or in the case of some publishers like Nintendo, it's never.

Still delusional pricing that guarantees I will avoid your game for years if not forever even if it is great.
- Me and Ubisoft.
  I got the games for free but I'm still bitter.

A sequel to a game that was worth 25 Eurodollars at release? Yeah, well...
- I was just wondering that, too. Wasn't the first one almost like an indie title? Not sure, how much I'm mixing it up with Outer Wilds, but Wikipedia tells me their teams were around a similar size anyways...
  
  First one is an AA game I guess. Better production value than an indie title, but far from Skyrim or GTA.

We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we've got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
- Consoles are a walled garden - the only reason they can do what they do is because of the lack of options for the customer to use their hardware.
  PCs are the only gaming platform (apart from perhaps smartphones) that have an open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms. You don't have to publish with Sony and Microsoft, and the majority don't.
  Unless your console has homebrew, you will always be screwed by the platform holder.
  
  open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms
  Splitting hairs here, but Steam is a pseudo monopoly at this point. Sure, one can not publish a game there, but that's hard. And on multi-store releases, I don't think publishers are allowed to undercut it on other platforms.
  Which is fine since (even though 30% is not cheap) Steam is behaving and working well...
  For now.
  
  Sorry, I'm not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn't charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren't doing so hot. Microsoft hasn't done console exclusives for a decade.
- But people forget about the DLC that is expected of the consumer to buy for the “full experience”. Some games don’t have a complete story if you don’t buy the DLC or you can’t access all the features without DLC, such as multiplayer games that don’t let you play with your friends if you don’t have that specific DLC pack.
  So not only is it a $70 price up front, they also want you to spend, at least, an extra $30 on the new DLC season pass or buy the DLC separately at a slightly higher cost over time. Also not including the special edition packs with extras, either physical or digital, that add to that initial $70. Ubisoft is the biggest asshole in this space, going as high as $120 for a day 1 release.
  
  I don't doubt that game studio business models have gotten scummier, but I never liked the phrase "The full experience".
  There's a few Bioware games I can cite where it was a terrible setup that added story-critical quests through DLC, but most often, a "special edition" or even the season passes tend to add very optional, often-ugly, costumes to games that already offer a number of costumes with the base game.
  Saying it often makes people picture that they don't get an ending to their story, or are locked out of abilities. There are live service games with that issue - the "hero model" being a frequent offender, but in the best of those games, the game's base price is low and even the guide authors will acknowledge few people should feel the need to buy every character.
  
  I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don't care if they got the full experience. If you're playing with your friends, they've got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they've just got a character that you don't, or in something like Civilization, if they know they're playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn't include the DLC you don't have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
- Game prices have been higher before, but the economy is kind of fucked right now (personally, as a Brazilian, buying foreign games was already fucked, but still).
  
  How's Brazilian regional pricing doing so far? I heard some countries are getting the short end of the stick now because of some users VPN routing to another country for deals.

That's still overpriced.

If the reviews are good, I'll spend the $20 on game pass for a month.
But only if the reviews are very good.
Or some other game caught my attention.
Or I'm replaying Outer Worlds 1
Or I'm still playing Monster Hunter.
Or.... I think I'll just pass on it.
- I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that's it's from the team that made "New Vegas".
  I played it for a few hours and dropped it.
  It wasn't bad. It just wasn't good. And absolutely not preorder good.
  
  I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that’s it’s from the team that made “New Vegas”.
  I did a whole review of this game, and one of the first things I tackled was that it is absolutely not from the New Vegas team in terms of writing or design leadership. I completely blame the marketing for setting wrong expectations by creating that connection.
  It is a good game, but going in wrongly thinking (due to misleading marketing) that it is New Vegas In Space is going to leave you frustrated.

I liked the first Outer Worlds a lot. I loved Parvati's storyline and was so excited when she finally went on that date with Junlei. However, even I'm not paying that much for a sequel.

Does it play like a higher budget game?

Good, they needed to have sense knocked into their incompetent heads. This was such a big price hike in such an economically uncertain time. Thankfully, consumer outrage was strong enough to convince them to lower it back to a price that I still consider too high. I miss the $60 dollar price tag. 🥲

Pay for something that will be on Game pass in 2 weeks?
- They set the 70$ price point and they set the gamepass price, it's all abstract values that they decide. That's price anchoring at play, you think you're getting a good deal in comparison, so of course you get the gamepass, but no matter which product you buy, microsoft wins.
- Well yes, but understand this is the function of gamepass being so cheap at the moment, to convince you temporarily that it is in your best interests as a consumer to rent video games rather than buy them because for now massive corporations like Microsoft are artifically holding the consumer price of these subscription services low to entice enough customers to buy in that they can then turn around and destroy other methods of earning a living in the video game industry as anything but a tiny indie game studio and waves wand with flourish all of a sudden the video game industry sucks even more than it used to and you have to watch ads every 10 seconds even though you are paying more for gamepass "premium crystal edition" than you do for all your streaming TV services combined....
  Look if that is the future y'all want, great, but just be honest about it at least?
- Sure, I've bought tons of games that are on Game Pass, because I like keeping the game when I'm done, and not having to rush to finish it before the subscription renews.

What a fucking waste of money. Xbox cuts are obvious.

Wait for sale.

Just consider what you're up against - the first one was 7.49€ (the lowest I've seen) and I haven't bought it yet simply because I have too many games to play for years now. I certainly won't pay more than 10€ for the original or the sequel and I'd never pay MS for their shitty subscription.

65 comments