Before Jordan Morris of Mister Morris Games became known for Rusty's Retirement, an idle farming sim that catalyzed a wave of similar bottom-of-your-screen interactive toys, he made 2022's Haiku, the Robot, a lovely little 2D Metroidvania that had taken inspiration from Hollow Knight. In an interview with GamesRadar+, Morris says he struggled with how to price Haiku, in part because Hollow Knight, still regarded by many as an exemplar of the genre even as we continue the multi-year wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong, was criminally underpriced.
"So Haiku, I felt like I took a bit of a risk, because I just felt Hollow Knight was so underpriced, like €15 or $15," Morris tells me. "In fact, I bought it multiple times because I'm just like, take my money, please. I've got it on Xbox, Switch, and PC. So yeah, I felt like that's too cheap, and for the time that it released versus the time that I was releasing mine, obviously the economy had changed. And you have to keep in mind discounts, how you discount your game.
Haiku, the Robot went on to sell over 200,000 copies at its $20 price point – many of them while it was on sale, as Morris notes – demonstrating that the price is just fine for a game of this size, nature, and quality.
A quick look at the top-rated Metroidvania games on Steam shows a spread of similar, and even marginally higher price points. The excellent Nine Sols is well worth it at $29.99, for instance. Another topical example would be Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, one of my favorite games of 2025 so far. It's $24.99 at full price, the same as its predecessor Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.
If anything, Hollow Knight is a big outlier here. It's significantly longer than most of the top-rated Metroidvanias today, and while all of the games mentioned here are great, I'd argue Hollow Knight is also the standout among them. When the game first caught on in 2017, I remember loads of people saying even then that it was underpriced, almost as if Team Cherry didn't know what it had on its hands.
More recently, Morris says Rusty's Retirement posed a different challenge for pricing. "For Rusty, I was a little bit more cautious just because I had my own personal fear that people would look at Rusty and think, well, it's not really a game, you know?" he says. "It's this thing that sits on the bottom of your screen. And, yeah, I kind of get that.
"So I kind of didn't want to price it to the price point of, like, a full farming simulator, which are like, I think the minimum is like €20 now, even though Stardew Valley is like less than $15. But yeah, I don't want to do that, and I didn't want to price it so low, how these idle games are, because I felt like it was a bit more. It's more in the middle of a farming sim or an idle game. So it's not quite as cheap as an idle game, but it shouldn't be as expensive as a farming sim. So I basically just picked down the middle, essentially. So I landed on $6.99."
At $6.99, which is right around my personal 'I'll try anything once' threshold, Rusty's Retirement has sold around 550,000 copies, likewise proving that people are happy to pay a little more than the usual $2 or $3 idle game price tag for something fun and eye-catching. It's an interesting little slice of indie data, and Morris says he couldn't be more pleased with where his game dev career has ended up. He has ideas for future projects, which he'd like to keep reasonably small in scope, but for now he's focusing on more updates for Rusty.
"The goal has always been to just earn enough to make more games," he says. "And I'm just so happy that it's worked out that way for me."
Here are even more of the best Metroidvania games you can play today.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
