Peak is $8 because the devs wanted you to see a $5 price tag and, hey, "eight bucks is still five bucks"

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Well they say all five bucks are created equal, but if you look at $5 and $8, you can see that statement is not true

Peak mesa biome
(Image credit: Aggro Crab / Landfall)

Peak's $8 price tag is easy on the wallet, particularly if you're trying to convince a cash-strapped friend group to all jump into a new co-op romp. Co-creator Nick Kaman jokes that the $8 investment really reads more like a $5 to players' eyes, and this is one of those jokes that has the unmistakable ring of truth about it.

"We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?" Kaman says in an interview with Game File (paid article link). "In a player's mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that's five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that's still five bucks. Four bucks is also kind of five bucks. Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free."

The idea is that we make certain mental groupings of the price tags we see on Steam. Whatever psychological barrier there is to buying a game at $5 is roughly the same as there is to buying one for $8 – and, honestly, I can kind of see it. While, again, Kaman frames this as a joke, I'm immediately recognizing my own buying tendencies here.

"We've got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks. And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?" (I do want to point out this is a direct quote, taken as it was written for clarity.)

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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