The price went up. The quality went down. And somehow we’re the problem for noticing.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint — October 29, 2026
Let me say the quiet part first, because somebody has to. I am not against paying $80 for a video game. I am against paying $80 for a beta test with a logo on it.
The $80 era started in June 2025, when Nintendo launched the Switch 2 with an $80 game sitting next to it. Just like that, the $70 ceiling was gone. And here is the pattern of the last few years, the one you can’t unsee once you see it. Prices went up. Launch quality went down. The game ships broken, the apology post goes up, the real patch lands three months later, and the day-one buyer gets a new job title: unpaid tester. Then the publisher acts surprised that we’re angry.
So I built the case file. Seven games. What they promised, what they shipped, what they said when we complained, and where they stand now. Read it, and then tell me the $80 era was earned.
Case 1: Mario Kart World, the One That Opened the Door
The promise: on June 5, 2025, Mario Kart World launched with the Switch 2 at $79.99, the first $80 game from a major publisher. Players pushed back immediately, and Nintendo sent out executive Bill Trinen to defend it to IGN. His answer deserves to be quoted in full, because every publisher on Earth memorized it: “I would say it’s less about the strategy of pricing Mario Kart World, it’s more just whenever we look at a given game, we just look at what is the experience, and what’s the content, and what’s the value?” He called it “probably the richest Mario Kart experience they’ve ever had.” Experience, content, value. Remember those three words. They are the whole test.
What shipped: and here is the twist nobody expected in a piece like this. A finished game. Mario Kart World reviewed well, an 86 on Metacritic, with 97% of critics recommending it on OpenCritic. It ran. It worked. People argued about the design, the long highway drives between races, an open world that felt emptier than the trailers suggested. Legit complaints. But nobody had to reboot anything, nobody edited a config file, nobody got told their console was the problem. The game on the cartridge was the game in the ads.
Where it stands: Nintendo never apologized, never blinked, and never cut the price, and the market backed them up. Mario Kart World became the best-selling Switch 2 game, over 15 million copies sold as of Nintendo’s mid-2026 reporting, helped by the console bundle that quietly turned it into a $50 game for a lot of buyers. It is still $79.99, still getting free updates. So no, Mario Kart is not the villain of this article. It is the control group. It proves $80 can be fine. The crime scene starts with everyone who treated Nintendo’s price as a permission slip and brought none of Nintendo’s polish with them.
Case 2: The Outer Worlds 2, the One Time We Won
The promise: in May 2025, Xbox announced that some of its big first-party holiday games would jump to $79.99, and at the June showcase, The Outer Worlds 2 got the honor of going first. Obsidian’s RPG is a good series with loyal fans, but loyal is not the same as unlimited, and the backlash started before the showcase stream even ended.
The response: it worked. On July 23, 2025, Microsoft reversed the price to $69.99, three months before launch. Obsidian announced it with a joke that told you exactly who won: “We have received your SOS via skip drone about the pricing.” Microsoft’s official statement was more corporate: the company would “keep our full priced holiday releases, including The Outer Worlds 2, at $69.99 — in line with current market conditions.” Market conditions. Sure. The market condition was us, screaming, with our wallets closed. And the refunds were real: Steam pre-orders were re-charged at the new price, Battle.net pre-orders were cancelled and re-ordered at $69.99, and console players got the $10 difference back.
Where it stands: The Outer Worlds 2 launched on October 29, 2025 at $69.99, which means not one human being ever paid $80 for it. The price tag died before the game did anything wrong. Keep this case in your pocket, because it is the proof that the lever works. We did not write a petition. We just said no, together, early, and loud.
Case 3: Borderlands 4, Where the CEO Became the Final Boss
The promise: Borderlands 4 had goodwill, a huge fan base, and a simple job: don’t fumble it. The fumble started early. In May 2025, before the price was even announced, a fan begged Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford not to charge $80. His reply is now legend: “A) Not my call. B) If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.” He then explained that he once paid $80 for Starflight in 1991 on a minimum wage ice cream parlor job. Inspiring stuff, Randy. Rent was also different in 1991.
What shipped: the game launched in September 2025 at $69.99, which should have been the end of the drama. It was not. The PC version arrived with serious performance problems, and the Steam rating opened at Mostly Negative before climbing to Mixed, where it still sits. The receipts were ugly: PC Gamer’s testing had an RTX 5090, a two-thousand-dollar graphics card, averaging around 40 frames per second at 4K ultra without upscaling help. On console, per GamesIndustry.biz reporting, one suggested fix for a memory leak was to periodically reboot your console. Reboot. Your console. In 2025. That was the tech support.
The response: Pitchford spent launch week doing tech support and combat at the same time. He called the game “pretty damn optimal.” He called it “a premium game made for premium gamers.” He told one unhappy player, flat out: “Please get a refund from Steam if you aren’t happy with it.” And when players complained about being pushed toward AI upscaling, his answer, per Game Rant, was: “I’m sorry you don’t like being told to use DLSS, but that is the way.”
Where it stands: the game still sold, over 300,000 people playing at once on Steam at its peak, a series record. But in November 2025, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick admitted sales were “a little softer than we would have liked,” and put the blame on the PC optimization challenges. Analyst estimates put it around 2.5 million copies in its first two weeks, well short of Borderlands 3 moving five million in five days. Gearbox keeps patching, and calls performance its top priority. The game was good. The launch made sure fewer people found out.
Case 4: Monster Hunter Wilds and the Typo That Broke Our Brains
The promise: Monster Hunter Wilds, February 28, 2025, $69.99, the sequel to one of the best-selling games Capcom ever made. And the game underneath is good. The world agreed. It sold 8 million copies in three days, the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s history, over 10 million in its first month. On Steam it peaked at 1.38 million concurrent players, the fifth-biggest peak in the platform’s history. This was not a flop looking for an excuse. It was a phenomenon with a problem.
What shipped: the problem was the PC version. Performance complaints started on day one, and not from people on old laptops. From players on high-end machines. The all-time Steam rating sank to Mixed, where it still sits today, over 330,000 reviews deep. Then it got worse. Through the middle of 2025, the recent reviews crashed all the way to Overwhelmingly Negative, with some windows showing barely one positive review in eight. My favorite detail, reported by PC Gamer: players got so desperate for frames that a rumor spread about a typo in the game’s config file, where “Resolution” was misspelled “Resoltuion,” and thousands of people edited their game files hoping a spelling fix would save their frame rate. It did not. It was a placebo. But think about what that means. The customers were debugging the product themselves. For $69.99.
The response: Capcom’s first answer was a troubleshooting guide. Update your drivers. Check your settings. That kind of thing. Thanks, guys. Real fixes came slowly, in pieces: Title Update 2 at the end of June 2025 finally reworked the shader compilation that had been hurting performance since launch, and a later patch added DLSS 4 and FSR 4 support and cut VRAM usage. The frustration boiled over in directions nobody wanted: in July 2025 Capcom put out a statement about player harassment, and cancelled its own CEDEC developer lecture, a talk literally titled “Making Monster Hunter Wilds run smoothly,” because of threats against the staff. When a performance talk gets cancelled over performance complaints, the performance is the story.
Where it stands: after that monster first month, reporting on Capcom’s quarterly numbers had Wilds selling only around 477,000 copies in the April-to-June 2025 quarter, a collapse, and the word of mouth is why. In August 2026, Capcom cut the price permanently. The hunts are great. The monsters were never the problem. The engine room was.
Case 5: Jedi: Survivor, the Best Game on This List
The promise: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, April 2023, $69.99, the sequel to a beloved game from Respawn, a studio that knows how to ship. And I need you to hold two facts at the same time, because both are true. Fact one: the game itself is genuinely great. Critics praised it, it was nominated for Best Action/Adventure at The Game Awards, and it landed among Steam’s top new releases of 2023. Fact two: the PC version was a crime scene.
What shipped: Digital Foundry’s video on it was literally titled “Worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023?” and their verdict deserves to be read out loud: “Plagued with shader compilation stutter, traversal stutter, nonsensical CPU limitations… virtually everything that could go wrong with a PC port is present and correct in this awful release.” They called the quality of the code “unacceptable.” An RTX 4090, the most powerful graphics card money could buy at the time, could not brute-force this game into running smoothly. Traversal stutter through every door, shader stutter at every new effect. The two stutters PC players hate most, in one $70 box.
The response: EA put out a statement admitting the game was not performing to its standards for a percentage of PC players. A percentage. My friends, the percentage was everyone. Then came the part this industry runs like a subscription service: patch after patch, month after month, slowly dragging the PC version toward the game console players had on day one.
Where it stands: fixed, eventually, the way almost everything on this list gets fixed, late and for free, by the same people who charged you full price to wait. Survivor later got ported to the PS4, a console from 2013, in September 2024. Sit with that sentence. And today the $69.99 launch is a trivia answer: the game regularly shows up in sales for around ten dollars. Play it in year two and you played a great game. Pay full price on PC in week one and you paid a premium to beta test a port of it.
Case 6: The Last of Us Part I, the Apology That Broke My Heart
The promise: The Last of Us Part I on PC, March 2023. This one hurt personally, because it is one of my favorite games ever made, from Naughty Dog, the studio whose whole brand is polish. The PC version cost $59.99, cheaper than almost everything in this file, and was co-developed with Iron Galaxy. If that name rings a bell, it should: Iron Galaxy was also behind the infamous PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight. The game had already been delayed by a few weeks specifically so the launch would be in “the best shape possible.” That was the best shape.
What shipped: crashes. Visual bugs that turned characters into memes within hours. Loading times from another decade. And the famous shader building, a progress bar that could eat close to an hour on some machines before you played a single second, burning your Steam refund window while it cooked. The receipts: Steam reviews opened at Mostly Negative, launch trackers had barely a third of reviews positive, and PC Gamer clocked the positive share at about 43% in those first days. Valve even downgraded it to “Unsupported” on Steam Deck. A storefront telling you, in writing, do not buy this.
The response: four days after launch, Naughty Dog, Naughty Dog, had to publicly apologize: “We know some of you have not experienced the Naughty Dog quality you expected.” A hotfix landed on April 4, a bigger patch followed the same week, and then the long march started. Patch after patch after patch, for months.
Where it stands: this is the one redemption arc in the file, so let’s give it its flowers. The reviews climbed out of Mostly Negative into Mixed within weeks, the Steam Deck badge went from Unsupported to Verified by June 2023, and today the game sits at roughly 84% positive across more than 108,000 Steam reviews. The masterpiece was always in there. It just needed a few months of free labor from its own developers to escape. Which raises the only question that matters: if the good version was always possible, why did the most loyal customers, the first people in line, get the bad one?
Case 7: Suicide Squad, $70 In, $200 Million Gone
The promise: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, February 2024, $69.99, from Rocksteady, the studio that made the Batman Arkham games, some of the best superhero games ever made. A live-service shooter that nobody, and I mean nobody, asked Rocksteady to make. Bloomberg’s reporting on the development described years of shifting visions and a culture of “toxic positivity” where criticism was discouraged. Read that again. The building knew. The building was not allowed to say it.
What shipped: bugs, server issues, and an audience that left in a hurry and never came back. The receipts are the coldest in this whole file. IGN scored it a 5 out of 10. On Steam, the game’s all-time peak was 13,459 people playing at once. For a $70 AAA live-service launch from a famous studio, that number is not low, it is historic. Within weeks, the daily peak was under a thousand. Warner Bros. Discovery’s CFO admitted the game “has fallen short of our expectations,” and the company took a loss of around $200 million on it. Two hundred million. Layoffs at Rocksteady were reported not long after. That is what a bad bet costs.
The response, and the ending: to Rocksteady’s credit, they finished what they promised on paper, four seasons of content, while the building burned down around them. In December 2024 the game got an offline mode, which for an always-online live-service game is the corporate equivalent of a white flag. The final update, Episode 8, landed on January 14, 2025, less than a year after launch. The same month, the game was handed out free to PlayStation Plus subscribers. Free, eleven months after people paid $70 for it. The servers are still up, technically, which separates it from the live-service games that got deleted entirely. A few hundred people still log in. If you paid $70 at launch, you bought a ticket to a theme park that closed before your second visit, then started letting people in free out of pity.
Quick Facts
- The game that opened the $80 door: Mario Kart World, $79.99, Switch 2 launch, June 2025
- The one that got reversed: The Outer Worlds 2, $79.99 announced, cut to $69.99 after backlash, pre-orders refunded the difference
- Borderlands 4: $80 drama, $69.99 launch, Mixed Steam reviews over PC performance
- Suicide Squad: $69.99 at launch, roughly $200 million loss for Warner Bros. (per Bloomberg reporting), support ended within a year
- GTA 6 price: $79.99 Standard / $99.99 Ultimate, confirmed June 24, 2026
- GTA 6 release date: November 19, 2026, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S
- GTA 5 lifetime sales: Over 230 million copies (Take-Two)
Why GTA 6 Is Different, and It Is Not Even Close
So now we arrive at GTA 6, $79.99 for the Standard Edition, $99.99 for the Ultimate, confirmed by Rockstar and Take-Two back on June 24, 2026. Same scary number as Mario Kart World. And I will pay it without blinking, on day one, happily. Let me explain why this is not hypocrisy.
Watch the trailers again. Not for the hype, for the honesty. When Trailer 2 dropped in May 2025 and people accused Rockstar of secretly capturing it on a PS5 Pro or a developer PC, because it looked too good, Rockstar answered in public, in writing: the trailer “was captured entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5, comprised of equal parts gameplay and cutscenes.” Half of that trailer is gameplay, and all of it ran on the base machine. Rockstar’s launch trailer, released October 15, 2026, carries the same line in its own description: “This trailer was captured entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5.” The marketing is the game.
And it is not just trailers, either. Edge magazine sat down and played the real build. 90 minutes. Unscripted. At Rockstar North. And what they reported back (their reporting, not a Rockstar promise, I want to be clear) backs the footage up: around 600,000 NPC animations, and art director Aaron Garbut describing “an order of magnitude more interiors” than past games. I went through the whole hands-on in our Edge breakdown. Then there is the track record. GTA 5 launched polished in 2013 and has now sold over 230 million copies, per Take-Two, because people still live in it more than a decade later. Red Dead Redemption 2, same story. And when GTA 6 needed more time, Rockstar took it, twice. Every company in this file chose the release date over the game. Rockstar keeps choosing the game.
That is the whole difference, simple enough to fit on a tombstone: the problem was never the $80, it is charging $80 without the work to back it up. One side shows you the real game, captured on real hardware, and delays when it is not ready. The other side shows you a fantasy, charges you first, and patches later. I am not paying $80 for a price tag. I am paying $80 for the work. Rockstar did the work.
November 19, I pay my $79.99 with a smile. Every other publisher trying to ride that price tag with an unfinished game gets my favorite feature of the modern internet: waiting for the sale.
So tell me where you land. Is $80 ever fair, or is the line drawn at finished games only? Drop it in the comments, and follow NaurhueBR on YouTube, because on launch night we test GTA 6 properly, live, and we will find out together if it earns every cent. The full price tracker is in our confirmed vs rumor breakdown.
The Scorecard
- Mario Kart World — $79.99: Shipped finished, reviewed well, sold over 15 million. The price stuck because the game worked.
- The Outer Worlds 2 — $79.99 → $69.99: Reversed before launch, pre-orders refunded. Nobody ever paid the $80. Backlash won.
- Borderlands 4 — $69.99: The CEO fought the customers on social media, and the publisher later admitted sales came in soft because of the PC version.
- Monster Hunter Wilds — $69.99: Capcom’s fastest seller ever, then recent reviews crashed to Overwhelmingly Negative and the price got cut permanently.
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor — $69.99: A great game wearing one of the worst PC ports of 2023. Fixed by years of patches, now a ten-dollar sale regular.
- The Last of Us Part I (PC) — $59.99: Naughty Dog had to apologize for it. Months of patches later, players forgave it. The apology should not be a launch feature.
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League — $69.99: A $200 million loss, free on PlayStation Plus within a year, support over in eleven months.
- GTA 6 — $79.99: The homework was done before the price was announced. That is the entire difference.
Sources: Mario Kart World pricing, Bill Trinen’s IGN comments and the bundle via GameSpot, WCCFTech and OpenCritic; sales and review aggregates via Wikipedia. The Outer Worlds 2 price reversal, Xbox statement and refunds via TechPowerUp and Gadgets 360 (Obsidian’s statement and per-platform refund process). Borderlands 4 pricing and the Pitchford exchange via Kotaku and Engadget; launch performance, the RTX 5090 testing, the refund and DLSS comments via PC Gamer reporting summarized by TS2 and OpenCritic; the console memory-leak fix and industry reaction via GamesIndustry.biz and Game Rant; Take-Two’s “softer” sales comments via Notebookcheck. Monster Hunter Wilds Steam reception and Capcom’s troubleshooting guide via IGN; the config-file typo story and sales figures via PC Gamer reporting summarized on Arcader and the Monster Hunter Wiki; performance patches and the cancelled CEDEC optimization lecture via TechPowerUp and Notebookcheck; the recent-review collapse, sales cliff reporting and permanent price cut via Game Rant. Jedi: Survivor PC analysis via Digital Foundry’s “Worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023?” video, quoted by TweakTown and Geeky Gadgets; sales, awards and later ports via Wikipedia; current sale pricing via PlayStation Lifestyle. The Last of Us Part I PC launch, Iron Galaxy’s role, shader building and Naughty Dog’s apology via Gadgets 360, PC Gamer, NME and GamesRadar+; the review-score recovery via Gamepressure, Wikipedia and current Steam review data via VideoGamesCritic. Suicide Squad development, the $200 million loss and the end of support via Bloomberg’s reporting, summarized by Arcader and TheGamer; the final season, offline mode and Warner Bros. comments via Eurogamer; the PlayStation Plus giveaway and final update via PlayStation Lifestyle; player counts via SteamCharts; the later financial fallout via TheGamer. GTA 6 editions and pricing via Take-Two/Rockstar’s June 24, 2026 announcement, covered by Caesvra. Trailer 2’s base-PS5 capture statement via Rockstar, reported by Robots Over Dinosaurs. Launch trailer in-game PS5 capture via Rockstar’s trailer description, reported by Badiyaa. Edge issue 430 hands-on details are from Edge’s feature, as broken down in our own coverage.