Xbox's first $70 game gets ridiculed by gamers

Xbox's debut $70 first-party game is here...and the game's reception is going as badly as it possibly could.

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Redfall, one of the three main first-party Xbox games planned for 2023 behind the highly-anticipated Starfield and a new Forza entry, was released yesterday. Sadly, the game really didn't have much of a chance because it launched right into a controversy spawned from its 30FPS performance at launch.

Reviews gave players an idea of what to expect from Arkane Austin's middling live shooter, with many publications criticizing many of its core aspects including RPG content, badly-optimized multiplayer, unncessary loot grinding, and outrageously bad enemy interactions. Some YouTube reviewers even went so far as to say Redfall was one of the worst games of 2023. "Redfall has so many bugs that for more than two hours, we thought that the one of the bugs was a feature," ACG said.

Now that the game is out in the wild, players are finding out for themselves. This has led to public ridicule of Arkane's new shooter across the board, and more doomsayer rhetoric about the Xbox brand. The most prominent issues are regarding enemy AI, which is incredibly poor, and we've seen a few eye-opening videos that show just how awkward Redfall's gameplay can be. Enemies are slow to recognize players and often do not start attacking for many seconds after a player encounters them, and some enemies don't even attack at all.

Redfall has quickly become a PR fiasco situation for Xbox, Microsoft, and Arkane, especially given the game's high $70 price tag.

Just a bit ago, I put together hard data that indicates the higher $70 MSRP of new current-gen games is directly leading to lower game unit sales--a trend that reflects basic economic principals of supply and demand.

Shortly after, I polled over 25,000 gamers to see how they felt about $70 games and recorded their responses, with the vast majority saying that $70 was simply too much money to charge for all new games. Respondents indicated that they would spend $70 only in certain cases, as with marquee first-party games such as PlayStation 5 titles like Spider-Man Miles Morales and God of War Ragnarok.

Performance and AI issues aside, Redfall's reception may have been a little bit more kind if the title was not Xbox's first-ever $70 game.