Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was ditching a planned price increase for The Outer Worlds 2 and other "full priced holiday releases", presumably in response to poor sales and negative feedback.
Now, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty has been discussing this in an interview with Variety, explaining that Xbox wants to achieve "player satisfaction and deliver "player value" whilst also "needing to run the healthy business", and therefore it's a balancing act that they're going to continue working on.
Here's what he said about pricing for AAA Xbox titles:
“Our whole focus is on delivering player satisfaction and delivering player value. And we’re always going to be listening to what people want there. We’ve reacted in the last year and I think for us, the real focus is going to be — I’ll come back to the phrase meeting people where they are.
I think there’s going to be less of a focus on what’s that top line price of a game, as people start to engage in different ways with games. From our point of view, monetization just happens in so many different ways right now. So we’re going to continue to listen to the feedback from fans. We’re going to continue, to balance that with needing to run the healthy business. But right now, on the content side, we don’t have any pricing updates."
Of course, Xbox has increased prices in other ways recently — consoles and Xbox Game Pass being a couple of examples — and Booty certainly isn't saying that prices will never revert back to $80 for Xbox first-party titles in the future. For the time being though, it sounds like $69.99 remains the maximum fee as we head into early 2026.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons Xbox Game Pass Ultimate received such a big increase back in October, with Microsoft trying to charge more for their subscription rather than adding an extra $10 onto first-party titles. Whatever the case may be, don't be surprised if we hear more about price increases across the entire gaming industry next year.