Elden Ring‘s expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, is about half the size of the base game, wisely reusing assets. It costs $39.99, or about half of the original game at full price. Home Safety Hotline‘s expansion, Seasonal Worker, is about half the playtime of the base game. It costs $7.99, or about half of the base game at full price. All of these games use established assets and mechanics to make a new experience, something that steps out of the base game, and reignited the playerbase’s interest.
All of these are reasonable prices for both the customer and the business. The customer is getting something new, at a reasonable price that recognizes this is not a full, stand-alone product. The business recognizes that it has a built-in audience, but that there is a limit on what that audience will pay to quite literally expand their experience.
Starfield‘s expansion, Shattered Space, has a runtime of 5 hours (10 if you’re a completionist) across one city, one introductory station, and one planet. It costs $30.00, just shy of half of the game’s overall price. There are no new companions (and your most relevant companion has limited interactivity with the new quests), and only a handful of new weapons and armor sets.
Far Harbor, Fallout 4‘s best and most meaningful expansion—the best material within the game—sold for $24.99 upon release, slightly under half of the base game’s price. While it offered a relatively small play area, confining the player to one island, the overall runtime was about 10 hours (up to 20 depending on how seriously completionist a player), with in-depth interactions for the most relevant companion.
If we were to look at a more recent example from within broadly the same genre, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader offers the first two expansions for a $30.00 bundle. Each expansion offers 15 hours of playtime, a new party member (at least one of which has a fleshed-out romance), new major storylines and NPCs, new backgrounds, and all-new game mechanics.
The Shattered Space price feels founded in the hopes and dreams of Microsoft executives, hoping to recoup costs on an underperforming game. This is not to say Starfield sold poorly in real terms; selling about 2-3 million copies of a game which with middling to negative reviews and word of mouth would be a success. But Starfield had significant hopes attached to it: not only did it need to recoup a larger-than-average budget and acquisition, there were clear hopes Starfield would become science fiction Skyrim, a “forever game” that audiences continually return to and continually buy anew.
That didn’t happen, and Shattered Space is too small in scope to change the consensus opinion. Whether or not you personally enjoy Starfield, this is not the transformational expansion the game needed to bring people back on its side and address the core criticisms (unlike No Man’s Sky‘s suite of wide-ranging changes from update to update, expansion to expansion, which were targeted to address criticisms—and were released for free).
Shattered Space feels trapped between being priced high enough to bring in revenue and make customers who bought the Premium Edition Upgrade feel their $34.99 purchase was worth it, while also being a lower-impact production due to the perceived low sales.
If Shattered Space had been a lower-priced DLC containing the same material—the same more expansive RPG conversations and more visually striking locations—it would have done more to reinvigorate Starfield and pull revenue than as a $30.00 expansion.
Featured Image: Bethesda Softworks
Boss Rush Podcast – A Podcast about Video Games
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