The Outer Worlds 2 Can't Be Anti-Capitalist When It's Charging Us $80 To Play It

If you were afraid of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:$80 price tag of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Kart World catching on, I come bearing bad news. You were right to worry. Following its release date reveal this past weekend, Microsoft has updated 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Outer Worlds 2’s with a $79.99 asking price. That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launchin💞g on Game Pass and, like its progenit🍬or, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk. What does this move tell us about the future?

Well, for starters, games are going to get more expensive. I’m still not sold on the lofty threat that Rockstar is going to charge 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:$100 for Grand Theft Auto 6, but we aren’t awfully far removed from that reality right now. Companies have seen that Mario 🧔Kart World is still going to move tens of millions of copies even after daring to charge such a premium price, and know Nintendo is bound to repeat this strategy again and again with other triple-A titles. So why shouldn’t they, if there is money to be made? Gamers will complain but open up their w𒐪allets anyway, which has been proven time and time again in recent years.

Note: Randy Pitchford certainly fee🍬ls that way about Borderlands and its fans

The Outer Worlds Charging $80 Is An Unexpected Slap In The Face

You also need to consider the existence of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Game Pass and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Play Anywhere. The Outer Worlds is confirmed to be a part of both services at launch. It can be played with an active subscription, and if you do pick up a digital copy, it will carry across both console and PC without any obstacles. Microsoft pushed this heavily during its recent games showcase, avoiding the elephant in the room that most of its first-party games will also be arriving on PS5. That will be the big reason behin♈d this $80 asking ﷽price, and also where most full-priced versions of its games will be sold moving forward. But is The Outer Worlds 2 truly worth that much?

There will be no way to know until launch, bꦡut knowing Obsidian Entertainment, it will be an enjoyable RPG no matter what. But is this really the first game that Xbox should be pushing this new asking price on? It’s a smaller-scale experience that is far from the same level of popularity as its big hitters like Halo, Forza, or Fable.

I could bitterly rationalise it if this were th🎃e release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80, but that price point for The Outer Worlds 2 feels like a greedy change that proves companies are offering up a new normal for any game. Games are more expensive now, alongside the hardware required to play them, despite wages not rising to meet them.

I know games are more expensive to make than ever, but they’re also selling more copies than ever, whil☂e the unsustainable budgets and development cycles that underpin triple-A blockbusters is a system that those in power could change if they really wanted to. But in doing so they would jeopardise bigger and bigger profits, so more expensive games are a way to temporarily plug a dam that is already threatening to burst. However, The Outer Worlds 2’s anti-capitalist themes and characters make this a very ironic game to charge so much for.

And With This Higher Price, Its Themes And Characters Ring Hollow

What’s worse is that The Outer Worlds is built around critiquing, and outright mocking, this sort of capitalist behaviour. One of the first towns players stumble across is Edgewater, a humble homestead in which everyone works for Spacer’s Choice, a mega-corporation mining the planet for resources as every living soul under꧟ its employment is forced to work in terrible conditions and🦩 basically sign their lives away to capitalism. It’s an exaggerated critique of our potential future and how soon everything we do, say, and work for will be in service of profits for a higher power.

Obsidian pokes fun at how utterly absurd this concept is while also trying to fight back at such a terrifying dystopia through razor-sharp humour and player choices that encourage you to take the side of the people. One early conversation with a worker reveals they are having to pay off the funeral fees of a fellow employee who died while at work, because in death, you are💝 still a tool of the company to be abused. Judging from its recent gameplay trailer, The Outer Worlds 2 is no different. It’s a tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism and many of the fascist powers that underpin it all wrapped up with an exaggerate🍸d sci-fi bow.

Auntie’s Choice - the new ev🦄il corporation of the day - claims it came to the planet of Arcadia to “spread freedom and liberate resources for profit” all while sending a sizable army of soldiers to enlist workers and kill t🌊hose who dare stand up in defiance. It seems ridiculous, but that’s also a pretty stark reflection of our modern reality. Companies are willing to sacrifice human lives for their own gain, and in a futuristic sci-fi universe that positions entire planets as objects of capitalism, that feels like a natural evolution.

But how much is this writing and satire going to stand up in a game that is ch꧙arging us $80 🐼to experience it? At that price, it becomes a cynical piece in the corporate puzzle it claims to stand up against. Obviously, the developers responsible for it aren’t at fault here, and if I needed to guess, I’d say Obsidian’s writers are trying to take capitalism to task in ways that are fun, silly, but ultimately poignant when you break everything down. Sadly, by deciding to charge so much for the upcoming RPG, so much of its bite has been lost.