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Games

Budget Titles Dominate 2025's Top-Rated Games as AAA Prices Climb To $80 (bloomberg.com) 71

The highest-rated video games of 2025 are all budget-priced titles, with Metacritic top performers Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, and Split Fiction costing just $50, $30, and $50 respectively. This comes as Microsoft announces certain Xbox titles will now cost $80, following Nintendo's similar price hike for Mario Kart on Switch 2.

Clair Obscur, developed by a small French studio, sold 1 million copies in its first week. Split Fiction, despite being published by EA, was created by a small Stockholm team and has reached 2 million sales. Blue Prince, a puzzle-roguelike largely created by a single developer in Los Angeles, is showing strong performance on Steam, Bloomberg reports.

All three games share key traits: they use commercially available engines, take creative risks that big-budget projects couldn't afford, and target specific player demographics rather than trying to appeal broadly. The contrast is striking -- Clair Obscur's developers celebrated reaching 1 million sales while EA declared Dragon Age: The Veilguard a failure with similar numbers, underscoring the economic realities of different development scales.
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Budget Titles Dominate 2025's Top-Rated Games as AAA Prices Climb To $80

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  • Old games (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday May 05, 2025 @11:05AM (#65353537)
    This is why i just stuck to playing games that are many years old. They are still a lot of fun to play and so by the time I get to this game it will be at least half price.
    • by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      I've been doing this for years. I think the last full price game I've bought is Unreal 2004, or maybe Morrowind GOTY edition. Since then, I picked up the special edition of Oblivion for half off initial retail, and ditto Skyrim. Though I acquired an XBox One for my son from a relative who didn't need it any more, I picked up a 360 with two dozen games from an estate sale for $50. My daughter loves the old Kinect games - she plays them with her friends all the time.

      That being said I might spring for the new

      • It does look better, but there will be a fan version out later this year that you could play while waiting for the bug fixes (well, they will probably fix SOME of them) and a price drop. Never buy bugthesda shortly after release.

    • AAA titles don't interest me, but I'm just now getting around to Super Mario Galaxy. Great game and a lot cheaper as a pack of 3 games for the Switch. Technically I bought it used for the Wii first but I never got around to it and I could never keep batteries charged for the Wii remotes consistently, where the new controllers use the same charging plug as everything else.

    • I would add that many smaller independent games are worth buying especially since many of them are cheaper. For example Balatro was released last year on almost all platforms for $10. It is a poker style card game. Hollow Knight released in 2017 is considered one of the best Metroidvania games is $15 on Steam when not on sale.
    • What I also look at is the quality of the game. If the studio goes on to a sequel while the old version is still full of bugs or plain code flaws, then I'm not tempted to buy it.
      For example, I like city building games and have Simcity 1 to 4 and as a successor I am interested in Cities Skylines, but I've noticed fundamental flaws that won't be fixed now that they published CS II, which is also in a state of bugtesting by users.

      I'd like to have the source code when a game is abandoned like this (no, just pro

    • Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/606/ [xkcd.com]

    • The existence of excellent cheap non-AAA titles is the reason you're playing old games? You're making even less sense than usual, and that's saying something.

    • This is why i just stuck to playing games that are many years old.

      Good luck buying a game several years after release when games get delisted from stores. This can happen when the game is an adaptation of another company's product identity to which the game's publisher only had a limited-term license (such as DuckTales Remastered) or the game's online matchmaking ended service (such as Overwatch and Titanfall and Concord) or the console's online store ended service (such as WiiWare games).

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      And sometimes they are given away for free like on Epic, Steam, etc. I barely have time to play games these days. :(

  • If you look at inflation, $80 should be a bargain. But our wages haven't kept up with inflation for decades, and things are especially bad right now with unemployment rising steadily, so it isn't a bargain given our incomes.

    If we could get paid properly, and by we I don't mean the especially privileged but rather the masses, then we'd be happy to buy $80 games. They still offer more than four times the entertainment of a $20 movie. But where is the money?

    • by dostert ( 761476 )

      If you look at inflation, $80 should be a bargain. But our wages haven't kept up with inflation for decades, and things are especially bad right now with unemployment rising steadily, so it isn't a bargain given our incomes.

      If we could get paid properly, and by we I don't mean the especially privileged but rather the masses, then we'd be happy to buy $80 games. They still offer more than four times the entertainment of a $20 movie. But where is the money?

      I agree completely. Pretty sure I bought FF3 (VI) for the SNES for around $59.99 (on sale!) back in 1990. That would be $144 today according to standard inflation calculators. And FF3 is maybe 40 hours, max, before you completely run out of things to do. We have great cheap (and free!) games today. Heck, $144 would get you a discount GC for a year of GamePass Ultimate, which is well over 40 hours of entertainment.

    • Well find your favourite AAA title over here: https://howlongtobeat.com/ [howlongtobeat.com]

      The average movie ticket costs about $14, and conveniently (for the math) the average movie length is 141 minutes long, so you pay basically $1 / 10min of entertainment, or $6/hour.
      The average game takes 16hours to complete for just the main story. Picking the first AAA game in the list of popular games released in the past 6 months (Indian Jones) and you get 15.5 hours so that checks out. Assuming that it would cost $80, that is $5/hou

  • Personally I don't really care that much about what they're asking for the games new, because I almost never buy them right at release. Just about everything will be $15 or less (sometimes $5 or less) if you just wait on the price to drop that far. Might be a year or two out from release, but you can still play them.

    VERY occasionally a game is worth the price at launch (eg, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 at launch and was happy with the purchase), but aside from those just wait some.

  • No Balatro in here? I haven't stopped hearing about Balatro since it released while I've seen absolutely no discussion of Split Fiction.

  • And it's technically an early release game. Made by essentially 1 guy (someone else made the soundtrack).
  • by sad_ ( 7868 )

    i only buy games on sale, granted, you'll have to wait, but you save a lot of money, steam sales or humble bundles are really great to get lots of games on the cheap. typically i never spend over €10 on my games.

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