Digital Game Pricing Really Frustrates Me Sometimes

So with Vermintide 2, a Left 4 Dead-style game, recently released, I wanted to see if the first game, End Times - Vermintide, was available on the PS4. The first place I checked was the PS Store, and it showed up in the search results! I clicked it... and it was $39.99. The game came out on October 4, 2016.

I then decided to see if there's a physical copy of the game, and there is! On Amazon, it currently shows being sold for $19.90-ish. Cool. Then I read a slew of customer reviews for the game, and it no longer became cool. This game apparently has two main issues: the first being that, with it being an online co-op game, there's barely a PS4 community, and the second is the fact that you can only play the game online. The latter is absurd, because you're allowed to make your team members into bots, thus turning it into a single-player experience, but the problem with this is... that you still have to have a PS Plus account to play this way.

Now there are several, obvious reasons why the above two paragraphs annoy me so much. What if this game never had a physical release version, allowing for the ability to buy the game cheaper down the road when the game's community died down? Well, that leaves people stuck with the $39.99 version... for a game with a dead community. And with no way to play the game offline. What if someone was interested in playing Vermintide, couldn't run it on PC, and decided to get the PS4 digital version for that steep price, not aware of said issues? They just paid $39.99 for a game they can't really play. They can't refund it, either, since Sony has a policy of refusing refunds if you already downloaded the game.

I dunno. It just feels disgusting to me. You have a game available on the store which revolves around co-op and requires online functionality, even in a solo-play, are probably aware the game's community is dead... and you're still charging such a huge price for the game.

Having said all that... Vermintide is currently on sale in Steam for $11.25 (from its original $44.99) until April. I bought it. Oh, and you can solo the game just fine without having to go through additional hurdles like the PS4 version. Edit: though, I've read the game apparently runs on the devs' dedicated servers, so how long this lasts for the following years remains to be seen.