Back in June, Microsoft was determined to make The Outer Worlds 2 its first $80 game. A month later, it decided that was a bad idea. The tech giant promised not to raise the price of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 either. Was this a temporary reprieve or has Microsoft learned its lesson? The company didn’t commit one way or the other in a recent interview, but it did get briefly philosophical about what a video game price even means in the year 2025.
“Our whole focus is on delivering player satisfaction and delivering player value,” president of game content and studios Matt Booty told Variety last week. “And we’re always going to be listening to what people want there. We’ve reacted in the last year and I think for us, the real focus is going to be—I’ll come back to the phrase ‘meeting people where they are.’”
He continued, “I think there’s going to be less of a focus on what’s that top-line price of a game, as people start to engage in different ways with games. From our point of view, monetization just happens in so many different ways right now. So we’re going to continue to listen to the feedback from fans. We’re going to continue to balance that with needing to run the healthy business. But right now, on the content side, we don’t have any pricing updates.”
What Booty is gesturing at here is the way video game pricing rules have completely unraveled over the last decade. There used to be the price of the game on the shelf at GameStop and then whatever it got discounted to for Black Friday. Now games have extra expensive Ultimate Editions that diehard fans flock to day-one and multiple big discounts throughout the year.
Plus you have buffet-style subscription services like Game Pass (which are getting price hikes), which are themselves multi-tiered now, and pressure from cheaper indie releases like Hollow Knight: Silksong and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And all of these prices are changing all of the time across different storefronts as digital games are no longer anchored by their physical counterparts sitting on store shelves somewhere.
This is also a clever way of saying “pay no attention to the top-line price of our game being more than most other games.” Even if The Outer Worlds 2 is $80 at launch, the logic goes, it can be played for just $30 with Game Pass or purchased for just a little bit more than that for anyone willing to wait a few months (it was recently 20 percent off just a month after release for Xbox’s Black Friday sale). So who really cares, right?
Well, for now at least, a lot of day-one players who see themselves having to pay $20 more for a sequel to a game that launched at just $60. That’s why Microsoft reversed course and will “continue to listen to the feedback,” waiting, I guess, until Elysium freezes over and fans start clamoring for price hikes again. After all, Microsoft needs to “run a healthy business.” According to Bloomberg, that means a 30-percent profit margin, and not so it can start paying video game developers residuals.
