I’ve spent most of the past week during non-E3 down time playing through PS5’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, taking my time since I don’t have any embargoes to hit.
The game is great. I loved it. It’s a beautiful showcase of the PS5’s power, a truly next-gen feeling game. Combat is a blast and the characters are charming, even though this is my first time playing this series.
But once I was done, I had people asking me, “but is it worth $70?”
And I had to pause.
I will admit to a bit of sticker shock when I went to download Ratchet and Clank and was yet again hit with that new $70 Sony price point, where even a $10 increase seems like a lot when you have spent the last decade plus at the price of $60, with alternative revenue boosts like DLC and microtransactions (more than) making up the inflation difference.
I spent probably about 15 hours with Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, a fair bit of that was exploring and doing not-necessary side quests, so you could probably blaze through the base campaign in 6-8 hours if you really wanted to (though I wouldn’t recommend that).
I suppose you can do the old “dollar per hour” calculation of a $15 movie ticket for a 2 hour film being a “worse value” than 15 hours of a game for $70. But I don’t know if that comparison feels right anymore.
What Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart kind of feels like to me, what all these Sony games feel like, is renting one of those “premium” VOD movies for $20-30, when that could pay for 2-3 months of Netflix and its hundreds of titles. Even if it’s a good movie, even if it’s something you want to see, it still feels weird to pay that much for something with the alternatives out there.
I had a whole piece yesterday on how the price difference between Sony’s $70 game roster and Microsoft launching all its exclusive day one on Game Pass will equal anywhere from $500-1,000 over the course of 3-6 years spent playing those specific types of games, with Microsoft being the cheaper option. In this context, Ratchet and Clank is the premium VOD purchase while Game Pass is Netflix, just sitting over there with way more stuff for half the price.
But…no Ratchet and Clank, and therein lies the problem.
This is the gamble Sony is making, that their games are good enough and their IPs are valuable enough where you will decide that $70 price tag is worth, despite the hike, despite the alternatives on the market. But I think that decision gets harder and harder as time goes on. As much as I do love Ratchet and Clank, given that this is a game I’m now probably done with for good, I can’t help but thinking maybe it is better to wait for a sale, a $70 does feel pretty steep, regardless of its quality. This is something I didn’t really think about all that often when both Sony and Microsoft were doling out $60 games for a while, but now? It’s coming up often. And it doesn’t help that for reasons that remain elusive to me, Sony has stopped sending me review codes entirely, so yes, this is an actual issue for me, not a hypothetical one.
I highly recommend Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. It’s a lovely game and certainly one of the best of this new generation. But for $70? That’s a question for you and your budget, and there’s no hard and fast answer for this increasingly uncomfortable price point we’re going to see all across this PlayStation generation.
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