Microsoft Follows Nintendo’s ‘Mario Kart World’ Lead, Confirms ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ As First $80 Xbox Game
In the wake of Nintendo setting a new, albeit unfortunate industry standard with Mario Kart World, Microsoft has announced that Obsidian Studios’ upcoming The Outer Worlds 2 – whose narrative ironically enough centers on mocking unchecked corporate greed – will officially release as the Xbox brand’s first ever $80 game.
This price point elevation was first confirmed by way of the recent Xbox Games Showcase 2025.
As part of the event, Obsidian Studios released both a new trailer for the long-awaited sequel and a pre-recorded ‘The Outer Wilds 2 Direct’ presentation, the former providing players with their first major look at its gameplay and the latter detailing its development, creative intentions, and various retail editions.
Like its predecessor, The Outer Worlds 2 pairs its FPS/RPG combo gameplay with a tongue-in-cheek satire of capitalism, robber-baron style corporatism, and human greed, dropping players into an alternate future where the universe’s domination by various mega-corporations has resulted in most of humanity being forced to work for them as essentially indentured serfs.
Playing into the setting, the new gameplay trailer mockingly closes with its narrator praising The Outer Worlds 2 as “an adventure made for capitalism, by capitalism” and inviting players to “Celebrate the glory of capitalism by pre-ordering today!”
Likewise, the Direct frames its behind-the-scenes info in between a number of live-action skits wherein Sonic the Hedgehog film series lead Ben Shwartz appears as Obsidian’s ‘Head of Sequels’, a pie-in-the-sky-executive who literally clap overs the idea of players pre-ordering the game.
Though played for laughs, these ‘ironic condemnations’ of corporate greed took on a slightly more uncomfortable feel when the Direct ultimately revealed that The Outer Worlds 2 would be Xbox’s first game to launch with an MSRP of $80 USD.
And that’s just for the standard edition.
For an eye-watering $100, players can snag the Premium Edition, which includes the game, five-days early access, a DLC pass for Story Expansions 1 & 2, the Corporate Appreciation Premium Prize Pack (its contents including armor, weapons, and a pet), various pre-order-exclusive items, as well as digital copies of its artbook and soundtrack
Of course, this announcement went over as poorly as one would expect – in other words, not well.
On The Outer Wilds 2‘s Steam Community page, interested players found themselves in utter disbelief, their frustrations resulting in an explosion of threads featuring such titles as “$80 base price for this is insane”, “The Price Is A Joke”, and “$80? Hard Pass”.
Outcry on X was no less virulent.
“Gotta mention the absolutely BALLS to think people would wanna spend 80€ on Outer Worlds 2 when the first one was met with a worldwide ‘meh’, and [Obsidian Studios’ previous game] Avowed was arguably just a collective hallucination,” scoffed one user.
“Countdown has begun for the most tone deaf ‘self-aware jab’ in history to drop” mocked one.
“I hope this leads to the next video game industry crash,” yet another opined. “This will only revitalize piracy.”
At this time of writing, Sony is the only one of the “Big Three” yet to increase their prices for their AAA games to $80. This isn’t even including the myriad of major publishers.
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