Are £70 Games Becoming a Thing of the Past? The Rise of Affordable Blockbusters

In the UK, £70 may not guarantee quality, but it tends to mean you are getting a blockbuster or ‘AAA’ – a big-budget game made by a large team, built around cutting-edge graphics, sprawling worlds and dozens of hours of gameplay.

However, a handful of recent games lauded for their AAA-feel by critics and gamers alike – such as ARC Raiders, Split Fiction, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – asked for more modest prices of £30-£40.

Alexis Garavaryan, boss of publisher Kepler Interactive, told the BBC the decision to launch Clair Obscur below the blockbuster norm was, in fact, deliberate.

‘Ultimately we’ve seen a number of larger companies increase prices quite regularly. And we’ve kind of taken the opposite action,’ he told BBC News.

‘We try to think, ‘What do we think the price should be?’ And then we price it lower.’

Garavaryan believes we are seeing a shift in player taste away from the kinds of things that big AAA studios are expected to provide, including high-fidelity graphics and ‘the number of hours you get out of the content’.

Instead, he claimed, players are now more interested in how ‘exceptional’ or ‘novel’ the experience is.

A recent consumer study found most gamers are spending less on new games – with only 4% of US video game players buying a new one more often than once per month, and a third of players not buying any games at all.

Kepler Interactive itself is not exactly a small indie production, but a collective made up of several independent studios.

Rebekah Valentine, senior reporter at IGN, told the BBC Clair Obscur’s success may not mean a ‘shift away from AAA expectations’ entirely.

Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Game Business, agreed that while sometimes smaller-budgeted games do go out and ‘deliver major success’, it was worth remembering that blockbuster titles such as Resident Evil Requiem and GTA 6 are still this year’s ‘two most-anticipated games’.