Obsidian Reiterates $80 ‘Outer Worlds 2’ Price Is On Xbox, Not Them

Obsidian is having a big year of releases between this spring’s Avowed and this summer’s The Outer Worlds 2, in addition to the reveal of Grounded 2 on top of that. But while Obsidian works hard on all these games, the one thing they do not do is set the price, and that’s an issue that’s emerged in the wake of the reveal that The Outer Worlds 2 would be Xbox’s first $80 game.

Microsoft promised that $80 games were coming this year after Nintendo broke the dam with Mario Kart World. Sony does not seem to have hopped on board yet, Ghost of Yotei will be $70 this fall, but Microsoft is eager to get started.

The Outer Worlds 2‘s director, Brandon Adler, had this to say about the pricing when asked about it at SGF:

“We’re a game developer. We love to make games. We don’t set the prices for our games,” Adler said. “Like, personally, as a game developer, I wish everybody could play my game, because that’s what I want out of this whole thing.”

If this were say, Perfect Dark or something along those lines, I don’t think we’d be having this same conversation. Rather, it’s that this is an Obsidian game releasing at this price point. Not that these games are bad, but just that they’re not exactly sprawling a lot of the time compared to their AAA compatriots.

The Outer Worlds was released at the then-standard price of $60 back in 2019, and performed well enough to warrant this sequel. This year, Avowed cost $70, and sales of that were…nebulous. Microsoft did not exactly brag about that game’s performance very much, be it on Game Pass or the sales front. But while being at the “standard” price for AAA games has been the norm, this is a bit different as Microsoft has chosen this as a sacrificial lamb for the $80 price point. Well, perhaps that’s too extreme. A crash-test dummy? Hm.

The situation is more complicated here because of Xbox Game Pass. Subscribers don’t care whether the price is $40, $60 or $80 because it will be included day one there regardless. Rather, the price exists for those outside the system, and is Microsoft wants to push more subs, it now can say simply “three games a year cost exactly the same as a year of Game Pass Ultimate ($240)” when for the lower prices that wasn’t the case. Of course, Game Pass prices are no doubt going to go up again at some point, too.

Game pricing can be frustrating for developers as like Obsidian says, it’s simply not up to them when they’re not an independent entity. For a game like say, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that team can set the price at $50 if they want to (even if that was easily worth $70 or $80 for the experience). Or it also comes up if a game should be free-to-play or premium at baseline. Not going to be up to the developer.

Will The Outer Worlds 2 perform well at the $80 price point? When it comes to Xbox, that’s a black box at this point. At best, Xbox will brag about “engagement,” but we won’t know sales numbers, plus sales are always low because of Game Pass anyway. But this does seem like a strange game to start this trend with, and I’m not sure how amused the developer is about it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.