DOOM: The Dark Ages of Pricing

Microsoft has graciously put Doom: The Dark Ages on a 25% sale. They say it's to celebrate the upcoming QuakeCon and not at all because of the abysmal sales figures. Nope, not at all. The sale kicked off around July 30th on Steam, but I waited until the weekend to see what, if anything, would change. I've touched on this game a bit before, but it’s time we take a deeper look into this highly costly Game Pass bin-filler.

Back when it was up for pre-order, I was interested. I’ve played and enjoyed both previous games. But when I saw the £70 price tag, my first thought was, "Oh, I guess that's the deluxe edition." Of course, after a quick double-take, I crossed the game right off my playlist.

And now, less than three months after launch, we get this 25% "discount"... It's still bloody £52.49! That's more than what masterpieces like Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 cost at launch just 2-3 years ago.

Let's be clear: a major AAA game with a massive NVIDIA marketing partnership doesn't get a 25% price cut this fast unless something is seriously wrong. When was the last time you saw a big, successful title go on sale so quickly? It's usually a red flag reserved for absolute garbage. The most recent example is Suicide Squad. Monster Hunter Wilds is close, but at least Capcom got to celebrate 10 million actual sales.

For the most part, Doom: The Dark Ages is a well-received game. So what's the problem? The only metric Microsoft could really celebrate was "3 million players" at launch. This brings us directly to the financial black hole at Xbox: Game Pass.

I waited until Saturday evening, and the results are laughably pathetic for a game of this scale. Look at the SteamDB screenshot. Despite a weekend and a 25% discount, the peak concurrent player count barely went up by 300 people. It couldn't even maintain a spot in the top 30 sellers during a fairly quiet week.

The most telling number here is the wishlist rank: #6. This proves that many people want to play the game, myself included. But they either refuse to buy it even at the joke sale price of £52.49, or they simply cannot run it thanks to its demanding system requirements.

Even if we're to be extremely generous and say those 3 million "players" were all full-price sales at £70 (they wish lmao), after publishers' cuts, the revenue would likely just be enough to covers their marketing spends, before we even get to development cost.