What stage of capitalism are we in? Apparently, the one where there are 10-minute games on Steam that cost $999.99. Congratulations On Your Purchase is a walking simulator released in May that bills itself as a “luxury experience.”
The player walks down a corridor surrounded by paparazzi, separated from the rabble by a velvet cord “because some spaces must be protected from the wrong kind of people,” the description reads. When they reach the end of the red carpet, they sign their name on a wall next to the other misguided souls that spent $1,000 on nothing. And that’s pretty much it. “The price is not a mistake. It is the point.”
While the incredibly generous interpretation of this stunt is that it’s meant to parody luxury brands (the game is marked with a satire tag), NFTs, and other means of flaunting wealth, any commentary is canceled out by the fact that the game costs a thousand real human dollars.
If you need a reference for how much “effort” was put into Congratulations On Your Purchase, the Steam page is riddled with incorrectly formatted HTML (they didn’t close the break tags with “/br”) and there’s an AI disclaimer at the bottom that reads: “Some of the store page artwork for this game was created with the assistance of generative AI image tools,” because of course it was.
It currently has no user reviews on Steam, but one curator left a particularly insightful assessment. “YOU CAN ACTUAL [sic] BE FAMOUS IRL ON THIS GAME AND IM NOT KINDDING [sic], LOOK SPENDING 999$ ON THE GAME MEANS YOU ARE A RICH BOI AND FLEX ON STRANGERS YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.” PC Gamer took a look inside the game (for free via press access) and confirmed that it’s as bleak as it looks.
The upside is that no one appears to be buying Congratulations On Your Purchase. According to SteamDB, the game peaked at one concurrent player on launch day (May 28) and on Monday, possibly when PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens fired it up. Only six people have signed the game’s wall.
Anyone who really wants to flex on Steam should just buy Train Sim World 6 and all of its DLC. That will cost a total of $3,957.46 and will let you go down many corridors.
Over the years, Valve has come under fire for both under-moderating and over-moderating its platform. It has historically been fairly hands-off in filtering out scammy games (like this one), while more recently implementing poorly defined bans on certain types of sexual and violent content, leading to horror games that critique sexual violence, like Vile: Exhumed and Horses, being barred from the platform. These bans were driven by external pressure from payment providers and credit card companies, but the fact that Valve is filtering out potentially artistically meaningful games while allowing people to spend $1,000 on nothing is still not a great look.
Despite removal from Steam and EGS, Horses has sold 18,000 copies
Developer Santa Ragione says the game has made enough to cover the studio’s debts