Games

Spectre Divide lowers skin prices just hours after launch: ‘We took a swing that we thought would best set us up to support the game. Turns out we swung a bit high’

September 4, 2024

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andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk)

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Spectre Divide game director Lee Horn says Mountaintop Studios has “heard your feedback” on the steep costs of the game’s characters and weapon skins, and has reduced the costs by 17 to 25%, depending on the skin or bundle in question.

The “feedback” referenced by Horn was put into sharp focus yesterday by staff writer Morgan Park, who pointed out that Spectre Divide’s “Cryo Kinesis” skin bundle costed an eye-watering $90, an “insulting” price made more egregious by two points: One, the skins really aren’t all that great, and two, he couldn’t actually get into the game because of matchmaking bugs. Not a direct connection between the two issues, no, but you can imagine that people would be understandably more sensitive about high-priced cosmetics when the game they belong to isn’t working properly.

He wasn’t alone on that front. Plenty of Spectre Divide players on Reddit and the community Discord felt the same way, and weren’t shy about saying so. Some pointed out that the prices aren’t out of line with those of Valorant, which also offers notoriously (some would say obscenely) high-priced skins, but others countered that while Spectre Divide shows a lot of potential, it ain’t Valorant.

“That’s a $20 bundle at MOST on a good day,” redditor tehrink wrote about the Cryo Kinesis bundle. “This pricing implies it’s a direct competitor to Valorant and it’s clearly miles away both in terms features (64 tick servers, no ranked mode on release?) and skin appeal itself.”

The reaction was negative enough to spark price reductions, as well as an automatic partial refund (in Spectre Points, the in-game currency) for anyone who purchased the items before the price cuts. Here’s the new pricing:

Cryo Kinesis Masterpiece bundle with a Melee weapon: 9000 SP -> 7000 SP
Medusa Prestige bundle: 4500 SP -> 3400 SP
Eternal Guard Prestige Weapon Skins: 1500 SP -> 1200 SP
Mako Elite Weapon Skins: 1000 SP -> 800 SP
All Masterpiece character skins: 1800 SP -> 1500 SP
All Prestige character skins: 1300 SP -> 1000 SP

Spectre Divide Cryo Kinesis bundle

(Image credit: Mountaintop Studios)

Spectre Divide Medusa bundle

(Image credit: Mountaintop Studios)

Spectre Points are purchased in the game at a cost of $5 per 500 points, with increasing discounts as you buy bigger bundles. So for $100, for instance, you get 11,500 points—essentially a bonus of $15.

Spectre Divide Spectre Points bundles

(Image credit: Mountaintop Studios)

Horn said Mountaintop Studios settled on the original pricing because Spectre Divide is a free-to-play game, and “90%+ of players never spend a dime” on it.

“We love our free players deeply, but we also have to pay for the servers they play on (as well as the massive initial and ongoing cost of development), so the ‘freeness’ comes at a cost to us,” Horn wrote. “Being a new, fully independent studio with limited resources is tricky. We’re self-publishing, so every dollar you spend directly funds Spectre and makes the game better everyday. So we took a swing that we thought would best set us up to support the game. Turns out we swung a bit high, so we are adjusting to be better in line with your feedback.”

These are all fair points. It sucks, but the bottom line is that people who make games also have to make money—that’s how our system works. Still, while a 25% price reduction is meaningful, $70 is still a hell of a price for a bundle of weapon skins most aptly described as “white and grey.” You can buy Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 for the same price, and while I’m not necessarily suggesting you should do that, you could opt instead for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, or maybe pick up Stalker 2 and a nice sandwich.

Die-hard competitive shooter players often tend to pick a game and stick with it, and so spending money on other stuff might not have as much appeal for that crowd, but more broadly I think the whole “you could have five weapon skins or a whole-ass big-budget game” comparison is a fair thing to think about. I reckon Mountaintop was hoping its players would be from the hardcore Valorant or Counter-Strike crowd that’s more than happy to drop nearly triple digits on cosmetics. Evidently not.

The reaction to the announced price cuts seems mixed so far: Some players are happy to see it, and more to the point that Mountaintop Studios is willing to make adjustments in response to player complaints, but others say the prices are still too high for a game that’s just getting off the ground.

“The value just isn’t there and it’s insane to watch people try to defend it by saying ‘free game, free game’,” redditor Kripes8 wrote. “Yes the game is free, but 70 fucking dollars for a bundle of weapon skins is absurd. I’ll just take that 70 dollars and buy several different games and spend my time elsewhere.”

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