Valor Mortis at $40: why a Ghostrunner studio priced down in GTA 6's shadow
Valor Mortis, the Napoleonic soulslike from Ghostrunner studio One More Level, arrives on October 13 at $39.99 instead of full price. Publisher Lyrical Games says the decision was made out of confidence: this autumn is crowded, GTA VI owns November 19, and the only way a mid-budget game gets played is to become an 'and' game — something you buy alongside the blockbusters rather than instead of the
The short answer
Valor Mortis will cost $39.99 when it launches on October 13, 2026 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a $59.99 Deluxe edition. That is roughly half what a big-budget action game now asks for, and the reason has less to do with the game's size than with its neighbours on the calendar: this autumn is overstuffed, and November 19 belongs to GTA VI. One More Level — the studio behind Ghostrunner — and its publisher Lyrical Games have decided that the only way a new mid-budget IP gets played this season is to become an "and" game (Kotaku; TechSpot).
Why October became the bottleneck
The logic is easy to follow. Publishers have spent a year clearing out of GTA VI's blast radius, so the biggest releases landed in September and the weeks either side of the November 19 date. The overflow had to go somewhere, and it went to October: PC Gamer lists Ace Combat 8, Gears of War: E-Day, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Modern Warfare 4 in the same month as Valor Mortis, before counting a long tail of smaller titles — a new Hellraiser game, Silver Pines, Jonathan Blow's next project, Planet Zoo 2, the 1.0 launch of Enshrouded and a Final Fantasy 2D-HD remake (PC Gamer).
November is worse still: PC Gamer's weekly Steam survey counted 32 games dated the same day as Rockstar's blockbuster, a number that mostly measures how few publishers wanted to go anywhere near it (PC Gamer).
"We never regretted being an 'and' game"
Valor Mortis is a first-person soulslike set in a supernatural version of the Napoleonic Wars, in which a former soldier fights his way across battlefields with powers that no longer belong to him. It was not obvious that it should be cheap: in its announcement, the studio argued the opposite.
"We have had many discussions over the past year about the price of Valor Mortis," the developers wrote. "We believe the game has the quality, fidelity, and playtime in its 20-hour story to go toe-to-toe with many 'full price' titles. Still, this fall is stacked and there's high demand for your time and money" (Kotaku).
Blake Rochkind, who runs Lyrical Games, told The Game Business that the decision had been agonised over — "my biggest concern was that it would send the wrong message about the game. But this decision is made out of confidence" — and then explained the phrase the whole story now hangs on. "A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: 'We never regretted being an 'and' game.'" Even a few weeks of distance from GTA VI and Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake, he notes, does not help if players have already spent their money elsewhere (PC Gamer; Kotaku).
The price is the last lever
You can read the same adjustment across the calendar. Star Wars Zero Company and last year's Mafia: The Old Country arrived at $50 instead of the $60–70 they would once have carried, Mina the Hollower launched at $20, and the cheap-but-excellent friendslop hit Peak turned a low price into a strategy of its own. GTA VI sits at the other end — $79.99 standard, $99.99 Ultimate — and its own price is not going anywhere.
That is the asymmetry of the season. Rockstar sets a date and everything else moves around it; the rest adjust what they can, starting with the price. Valor Mortis is simply saying so out loud. GTA VI still launches on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
