can you really put a price on Thief Simulator?
virtual thieving sicko Ashley Feinberg explains a game with a puzzling sales strategy
Readers of BNet know that I am sick and damaged in many ways. One of my most acute maladies is that I enjoy playing video games. This is not as much of a problem as it used to be, but it's still an ever-present challenge. It twists your brain in disgusting ways; I cannot in good conscience recommend this hobby to anyone.
I am being a silly, li’l scamp and doing a bit here. But there are risks associated with the hobby. For instance, a thing that comes up a lot if you bear the awful burden of enjoying video games is the issue of price. This manifests in odd ways. For instance, discussions of price have distorted the critical apparatus around games in odd ways. Price matters in regards to video games in a way that it doesn't for other forms of media. Nobody (who is serious) would define a movie, or a book, or an album primarily on whether it is worth the price of entry. But because games have been, historically, relatively more expensive and targeted at children, the price tag is given greater weight. The concept of "bang for your buck" is more common in technology reviews than it is art criticism, and so it makes some sense that the conversation around games has come to include it.
This thinking can infect basic thought processes. For instance, in high school, when I had no income other than an allowance or a summer job, I broke down large costs by video games (which then cost roughly $60). Something that might have cost "150 dollars American" to a normal, functional person would cost "Two and a half Xbox games" to me. $20 was "10 Rock Band DLC songs," which cost $2 a pop. Right now, I assume you are perplexed, squinting at your screen and shaking your head.
In an effort to roleplay being fiscally responsible, I started paying a lot of attention to sales and deals. In college, that basically meant buying a bunch of physical media from Amazon on Black Friday. Over the course of the last decade, games have shifted to digital distribution, meaning that the platforms themselves are also the marketplace, and its easier than ever to check what's on sale any given week. For a certain type of guy, Steam sales are basically holidays, and sites like IsThereanyDeal.com track prices across merchants to tell prospective buyers when a game is at a "historic low." On top of this, the increasing prevalence of e-commerce referral links means that there is now a professional category of people who track deals and post about them on social media (or the homepage of the New York Times, lmao) and take a cut of the proceeds.
My point is that merely monitoring video game prices can be a hobby (or a profession) in and of itself. A pathetic and sad pastime but one that, well, I participate in. As I developed a habit of checking video game sale prices on a regular basis, I became attuned to the different pricing patterns: A game's price will drop lower and lower with each sale appearance before leveling out (Far Cry 4 on Xbox has hovered just out of my "sure, what the hell" threshold for about a decade). Or a sale will coincide with a big update for the game, but the price drop is static, like how every new No Man's Sky patch brings a precisely 50% price cut.
Sometimes, weirder stuff happens. The Dark Souls series was regularly on sale until its sequel in all but name, Elden Ring, became an enormous hit in early 2022. The series didn't go on sale again until this past summer, more than a year after Elden Ring spurred increased interest in the developer’s back catalog. It was a rare instance of a new game driving up the price of an older game, which was digitally available and thus, not even in limited supply. And when the Dark Souls games finally did go on sale again, I bought them because who knows when or if I'd get another chance? Mark behavior.
It should be abundantly clear that the way game sales work is a dark alchemy that I spend too much time thinking about. All of this crucial context brings me to:
Thief Simulator.
Thief Simulator is, from what I can tell, a game about simulating thievery. The player breaks into houses and steals things, and for some reason, it is very intense about simulating car engines? It is available on a number of platforms, but I first became aware of it during regular scans of the Nintendo Switch eShop sales page. What seemed like sporadic discounts eventually developed into a clear pattern. Under the section "Great Deals," I'd regularly find Thief Simulator, which normally goes for $20, on sale at a whopping 90% off. Thief Simulator for just $2? A “steal”! haha.
Here is the price-change pattern visualized over time, compiled by the Switch marketplace tracker, Deku Deals. It is a line graph (not a bar graph) depicting how Thief Simulator has dropped to $2 with admirable consistency over the last 3 years.
Odd, right? This pricing strategy plays on general expectations of quality. Whereas $20 might get you a decently made indie game, $2 is the price of cruddy mobile ports, exploitative (near-)free-to-play titles, and shovelware crap. One could argue that, because Thief Simulator spends about as much time on sale for 90% off as it does at full sticker price, $2 is effectively its real price, and the $20 price is little more than a marketing trick, a mirage.
That's just a hunch, but sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. In addition to the pricing shenanigans, this is what the website of developer Noble Muffins looks like:
I don't mean to be a web design snob. I really don't! But something about barebones Wordpress themes and a set of share buttons that still includes the Digg, StumbleUpon, and MySpace logos sets off my spidey-sense. These are not exactly signs of a company with an eye for detail.
I say all of this having not played Thief Simulator. But, like, come on… does this look like a good game?
“Who on earth could possibly be falling for this trick?” I wondered to myself.
So imagine my surprise a few months ago, when my friend, Ashley Feinberg, revealed that she is a Thief Simulator sicko and plays it regularly. According to the Switch’s time tracker, she has logged 35 hours in the game, though she disputes that statistic: “That can't possibly be right. There's no way I haven’t played this game for at least like 80 hours.”
"Huge news everyone," she announced to the gamer group chat last month. "Thief Simulator 2 comes out on Steam on October 4. Mark your calendars. This is the one we've been waiting for." (She also cautioned us against mistakenly acquiring The Thief Simulator 2023 - From Crook to Boss, which is a completely different game from a different developer and which apparently sucks. Her market research is second to none.)
Ashley, author of the gone-too-soon Trashberg newsletter, later called Thief Simulator "maybe the only perfect game in existence" while recalling an in-game Halloween event in which the player gets to rob a haunted house. Her review: "Very spooky."
After I defamed her as "the only living Thief Simulator player," she quickly corrected me by linking to a Thief Simulator 2 trailer from 2021, pointing to the many comments excited for a follow-up:
"i loved this game so much and i happy to finally have something to play over and over again"
"i like the first thief simulator so much! i cant wait till next year when this comes out!"
"I literally bought thief stimulator on sale & I got so addicted lmao 😂 now I passed it and I can’t wait for this 😫"
"won't lie, it's pretty funny that the 'master thief' is wearing fingerless gloves. you'd think the one thing you would want to cover would be you fingertips."
Joke's on me, I guess! To find out more, Ashley graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her love of Thief Simulator.
When did you first download Thief Simulator and how much did you pay for it?
February 12, 2020, a fateful day, for $2.17.
Wow, pre-Covid!
I’m no fair-weather fan
Did you buy it in part because it was 2 dollars?
I'd imagine the price played at least some factor into my decision, but on the other hand, I'm extremely irresponsible with money and I probably would have gotten it anyway. My favorite part of any game is A) collecting as much shit as I can and B) stealing things as much as possible, and I couldn't imagine anything hinging on those two things not being the absolute perfect game. And guess what? It is.
What is the structure of Thief Simulator? Is a level a house?
So basically how it starts is, you're a thief that's indebted to this guy Vinny for unclear reasons, and in order to pay him back, you've been relegated to a life of crime. Vinny will call you on your cell phone and give you story missions, starting off on Greenview St., which is where the first set of houses you can rob are.
You start off nabbing stuff from shitty houses, and then as you get more experience thievin’ and get enough money to buy more tools (different kinds of lockpicks, safe cracking tools, portable laptops to hack into cameras) you can start hitting richer houses. The richer houses have security cameras and harder locks or hired security. Eventually, Vinny will you send to Richie R. Street. And you might not guess this, but Richie R. Street is full of rich houses.
Oh! And you can steal cars and take them apart and sell the parts. I've learned a lot about cars from this game, I think.
Anyway, eventually you do all this shit for Vinny, and there’s one final job. And then (spoilers) the job is actually a bomb and Vinny kills you — but you’re not actually dead, and the rest of the game is about getting revenge on Vinny.
Wait, I want to know more about the cars. What did you “learn about cars”?
Well, “learn about cars” is maybe an overstatement but I do think that if you put a car in front of me I could probably figure out how to take it apart. I learned that if you get the tenant schedules wrong and someone goes into a garage and you go sit in the car to hide, it doesn't actually hide you and they might shoot you if they have a gun.
That sounds like a problem. Do you consider the game difficult?
I hate to say anything negative about the game because REALLY the negatives are just more positives but, sometimes it is hard to tell whether something is actually hard or if the game is just buggy.
For instance, to steal a nicer car, you have to use a signal cloner to copy the tenant’s car key. And you’re supposed to be able to do it from a room away. But for some reason it doesn’t work unless you're directly on top of this bitch. So you have to wait for the single hour in the day that she's asleep, and it's a 50/50 chance whether she hears you and wakes up with no real rhyme or reason as to why. But personally, I think that's good. Life is full of unexplained mysteries and our games should reflect that.
That’s really profound. On that note, has the game taught you anything about yourself?
For sure, it's taught me that before you go to sell your goods to a pawn shop, you should check the dark web because maybe someone is looking for a broken microwave and they'll pay you an insane amount of money for it.
What’s the Thief Simulator community like? Have they taught you any important strats?
I will periodically check on Reddit if there's something I get stuck on, usually there's someone that's posted something semi-related but, admittedly, it is not SUPER vibrant. So I must believe that most of them are like me, quiet but devoted. Much like God. [Editor’s note: ???????]
What’s on your wishlist for Thief Simulator 2?
Well, one thing I am excited about is that you'll be able to knock out cops. I don’t think you can fully kill them, but you can whack them with crowbars, which I feel like will be cathartic and healing for us as a nation. I do wish there was a way to disguise yourself as someone's family member and infiltrate their home fully, but I realize that's probably not realistic.
Okay, last question: do you think I have unfairly judged Thief Simulator based on the fact that it’s always on sale for 90% off?
I respect you as a person, as a journalist, and as a gamer, which is why it always shocks me to see you repeatedly slander a game that, yes, may regularly cost like $1.18 FOR 10 DAYS ONLY considering it would regularly go to the top of the charts for MONTHS. There has to be hundreds and hundreds of games that are constantly on sale and yet, they never grace the best sellers. Why is that, Brian? Do you have an answer for that?
I don’t… Damn.
That's right.
Thank you for opening my eyes.
Thief Simulator 2 — out now for PC!
Shortly after our conversation, I logged on to the Nintendo eShop…
