Why Is The Sinking City 2 Cheaper Than Big Xbox Games?

The Sinking City 2 arrives on Xbox Series X|S on Tuesday 18 August, and the detail worth noticing isn't the date — it's the receipt. The standard edition sits on the UK Xbox store at £41.35. The deluxe is £45.45 and the premium tier, which bundles the Holloway Manor content and lets you start a day early, is £49.59. For a brand-new, heavily marketed horror game from a studio with a real following, that is a long way under the going rate.

It lands in the middle of a genuinely crowded week. TrueAchievements counted 25 new titles hitting Xbox; Microsoft's own weekly rundown actually lists 29 entries between Monday 17 and Friday 21 August, one of which is an expansion rather than a standalone release. Strip that out and you still get 28 games in five days, which is roughly six a day.

Most of them you will never hear about again. Three or four are worth your evening. And the pricing on the headline act says something about how a mid-sized studio survives right now, which matters more to your wallet than any of the other 28.

Why The Sinking City 2 Costs Less Than £42

The short answer is that nobody else takes a cut. Frogwares develops and publishes this one itself, so the price on the store page is a decision made in-house rather than one handed down by a publisher's finance team. In the United States the standard edition is $49.99 — deliberately fifty dollars in a market where the biggest releases now ask $69.99 and occasionally $79.99.

Convert that habit to a British shelf and the gap is obvious. A flagship release from a major publisher typically lands somewhere north of £60 here, and often closer to £70 for the fancier edition. Frogwares is asking under £42 for the base game. You are, in effect, being charged the price of a decent indie premium title for something built at a much larger scale.

What a Lawsuit From 2019 Has to Do With It

Frogwares hasn't always been in charge of its own pricing. The studio fell out with French publisher Nacon in 2019 in a dispute over royalties, and the fallout was ugly enough that it has self-published ever since. That independence is why the sequel exists on the studio's own terms — and why a Kickstarter campaign, launched in March 2025, was part of the funding picture at all. Chief executive Wael Amr described crowdfunding as invaluable when the studio was dealing with infrastructure problems.

So the cheap price tag isn't generosity. It's a studio that has to win goodwill directly from players because it no longer has a publisher's marketing budget behind it.

The Rest of the Week, Monday to Friday

Mortal Shell II and its 72-hour head start

The sequel to the 2020 soulslike arrives on 20 August, optimised for Series X|S. Buy the Devout Edition and you get up to 72 hours of early access, meaning you'd be playing from the 17th. That's the same trick the premium tier of the Frogwares game uses, just stretched from one day to three — a paid queue-jump that has quietly become standard.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 returns with Cost of Hope

Also on 20 August, and the only expansion in the week's list. GSC Game World promises another expedition into the Zone with, in its words, dozens of hours of play. It runs on Series X|S, Xbox One and PC — one of the few things this week that isn't current-gen only.

The other two dozen, from cats to Gallipoli

The rest is the usual mix of low-cost store filler and genuine curiosities. Black Flower, a roguelike about keeping a fragile garden alive, opens the week on Monday. Arcade Archives 2 CYBER CYCLES revives a Namco cabinet on Wednesday. Yet Another Zombie Survivors enters Game Preview on Thursday. Then there's Hidden Cats in Barcelona, Find The Cats 2, WonderCat Adventures, Emoji Killer – Casino Massacre and a first-person piece simply called Gallipoli.

Where Game Pass Fits Into This Week

Nowhere obvious, is the honest answer. Microsoft's rundown for 17–21 August doesn't flag a single one of these as a day-one subscription launch. If you've been treating Game Pass as the default way to try new things, this is a week where you actually have to buy something — and that makes the £41.35 figure more relevant than it would be otherwise.

What to Check Before You Pre-order

A few practical things. Many of this week's titles are Series X|S optimised only, so Xbox One owners are largely locked out — the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. expansion, Black Flower and KeyQuack Quest are the exceptions. Several carry Xbox Play Anywhere, meaning one purchase covers console and PC.

• Premium and Devout editions buy early access, not extra story
• Play Anywhere titles include Archerio, Dark Reflection, Grim Trials and Ground Zero Hero
• Xbox Wire notes dates can still shift

If the flooded-Arkham survival horror is the one you want, the sensible move is to wait until Tuesday morning, read the first reviews, and then decide whether the premium tier's day of early access is worth £8 to you. It almost never is. And keep an eye on the pricing itself — if a self-published sequel at £41 sells well next week, expect other mid-sized studios to start undercutting the £60 shelf too.