Xbox controversially raised the base price of its mainline games to $80 in an announcement a few weeks ago. Now, it seems to be backtracking. Good, I say.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that the base price of its Xbox games at retail would hit frankly staggering $80, underpinning what has been an incredibly tough year for consumers and businesses alike with regards to spiralling costs. Whether it’s supply chains being impacted by arbitrary trade wars or sticky inflation from Covid quantitative easing, the market has been relatively unstable for the past few years for a variety of reasons.

In response, various businesses have put up their prices to varying degrees. Microsoft and Sony both raised the price of their Xbox and PlayStation hardware bundles over the past couple of years, and for a short while, it looked like the industry was poised to raise the base price of their mainline games to $80. It started with Nintendo’s Mario Kart World hitting $79.99 at retail, and then back and forth over whether Borderlands 4 would hit $79.99 as well — it ended up being $69.99.