Star Wars Outlaws Wants You to Pay Extra to Get All the Content

Video Games

If you’ve been paying attention to it, the reaction to Star Wars Outlaws, the new video game from Ubisoft set in the galaxy far, far away that feels smaller than your neighborhood, is not being received with much enthusiasm. But don’t worry; Ubisoft planned for that. Star Wars Outlaws, which is set to be released on August 30, 2024, is available for pre-order now, and if you check the pre-order page on the game’s official website, there are four options. There’s the Standard Edition for $69.99, which comes with the base game and the “Kessel Run Starter Pack,” which amounts to different skins for your vehicles. Then, there’s the Gold Edition for $109.99, which comes with everything from the Standard Edition, plus three-day early access (if you have a Ubisoft account) and a season pass that includes two DLCs with more missions and whatnot, another exclusive mission called “Jabba’s Palace,” and skins for the characters. The Ultimate Edition will run you $129.99 and comes with all the Gold Edition bells and whistles, plus more skins for characters and ships and a digital art book. Finally, there’s the Ultimate Edition Day 1 with Ubisoft+, which is really just the upper-tier version of Ubisoft’s subscription service ($17.99 per month) that comes with the Ultimate Edition by default because it includes access to premium editions of games on their release dates.

Some of the stuff they’re including is just useless nonsense that, in my opinion, doesn’t warrant all that money. (Who cares about skins for characters you don’t know or a digital art book?) What’s annoying is the DLC; there’s more of the game to play that you can’t access with the base game, which is not cheap (I know most games start at $69.99 now, but for someone who’s been playing a long time, that’s a lot of money), and they’re making you pay extra for more levels. I understand that DLC is common, and I’ve quite enjoyed some of it (those extra stories for Sony’s Spider-Man were excellent), but that was all content that came later; this is launch-day stuff that you can’t play unless you pay an extra $40 – more than half what the base game costs. That’s ridiculous, and I don’t think it’s going to help a game that people are already lukewarm at best on. So, why would Ubisoft do this? I think Asmongold has a good idea of why:

He’s probably right. Grummz talked about how expensive a lot of video games are today, sometimes double the budget of the most ludicrously expensive movies. They need to make that money back, and putting out games that aren’t exactly gonna set GameStop cash registers on fire won’t do it. So, they pull scams like this to get more money out of gamers. If you go for the Gold Edition of Star Wars Outlaws, you’re effectively buying one-and-two-thirds units of the game; if Ubisoft gets enough people to do this, they increase their sales by a substantial amount. (I’m not doing more math; let’s just say “a lot.”) And if they can use Star Wars Outlaws to sign people up for their subscription service, they can add that money to the game’s take, especially since these people have to keep subscribing to play Outlaws. This is, apparently, a better option for them than simply making a game more people want to play because we’re in one of the strangest areas of business history, one in which the customer is always wrong.

As a side note, my initial estimation of this game – which was mostly indifferent (I doubt I’ll ever play it) but more positive than most people seem to be reacting to it, almost by default – is constantly lowering. They’re invoking the Kessel Run and setting a DLC mission at Jabba’s palace? For the love of God, are they capable of doing anything new, ever? And having the Kessel Run be a part of this lends a lot of credence to the notion that Kay Vess is just a female Han Solo; how much do you want to bet she beats Han’s record? This is Star Wars now: the junk store version of something you once loved.