Microsoft, Not Obsidian, Priced The Outer Worlds 2 At $ 80

The Outer Worlds 2 game director Brandon Adler has cleared the air on the game’s $ 80 base price point.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Adler said this:

We’re a game developer. We love to make games. We don’t set the prices for our games.

Like, personally, as a game developer, I wish everybody could play my game, because that’s what I want out of this whole thing. But for the reasons and so like, why the $79.99 price point, you’d have to honestly talk to the Xbox folks.

So, Adler is in the same position Gearbox was it when it comes to the pricing of its game, Borderlands 4. Gearbox head Randy Pitchford didn’t say the game would be $ 80, but that the decision was up to their publisher. Take-Two Interactive. Unfortunately, Pitchford also made some mistakes in his messaging around this conversation that he would eventually have to apologize for.

Of course, the big shock to the system that got gamers in a frenzy over pricing was when Nintendo revealed that Mario Kart World, the system seller for the Switch 2, would itself be $ 80. As Nintendo explained, their intention was not to raise prices for all their games across the board to $ 80. Rather, they would price their games moving forward based on what they perceive to be its value.

While Microsoft has yet to explain their pricing decision, one could intuit that they came to the same conclusion for The Outer Worlds 2. It’s a considerably bigger scale game than their recent release, Avowed, and Obsidian promises an experience that you could return to for years. Microsoft’s prodigious game output as of late has included a lot of these bigger, broader action RPGs, both single player and online multiplayer as well. It will be easy to see them price future such titles at this steep price point.

It must also be said, it’s not like these publishers are unaware that these higher prices can price these games out for some consumers. Nintendo does offer a digital Switch 2 Mario Kart World bundle, so that gamers ultimately pay only $ 50 for the game. Subsequently, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Microsoft’s other games are all part of Game Pass, and even then there are options for gamers to fit their budgets and what devices they want to play on.

It isn’t quite the end of the $ 60 game, but it certainly looks like we’re finally getting these more ambitious games priced higher than the industry standard we had gotten used to for so long.