$2,000 Steam Game Creator Says Don’t Buy It If You Can’t Afford It

WTF?! There are a few expensive items for sale on Steam, though most of them are hardware like the Valve Index VR headset and Steam Deck. It doesn’t look like you’ll find similarly priced games. Technically, this is true because Hidden and Unknown is even more expensive at $1,999. Even its creator warns against buying.

Created by indie developer ProX.team, founded by someone going by the pseudonym ThePro. Hidden and unknown is based on the text and is described as “a story-driven game that aims to expand the audience’s perception of psychology and philosophy.”

PCGamer played the title by noting that it begins with an eight-minute Star Wars-style scroll describing the imbalance between male and female energy that makes Western men infertile due to testosterone depletion. It also causes women to become more and more masculine, which will eventually lead to the end of humanity. There’s also a time-traveling AI entity out there somewhere.

The Hidden and Unknown is primarily a visual novel, although only locations are shown, not characters, and appear to have been created using an AI-powered image generator.

Frankly speaking, ThePro, who is from Slovakia and now lives in Switzerland, said: PCGamesN that they don’t believe anyone will buy their game, and even want to “dissuade anyone from buying it if they can’t afford it, I don’t want to cause trouble”. It’s also much shorter than the two-hour playtime limit that Steam allows games to be refunded, so anyone who chooses to spend $2,000 on The Hidden and Unknown should be able to get a refund once it’s completed.

As for why they chose to charge so much for their game, ThePro said that a lot of it is based on their own life story. “I would not want to just sell my life for a penny, because for me the story means more than just a “game” in its purest form,” they said. ThePro added that the project originally started as a book and then turned into a game.

Charging $1,999 a game certainly brings a lot of attention to The Hidden and Unknown, so kudos to ThePro for what turned out to be a smart marketing strategy. I haven’t played it so I can’t judge the quality, but based on other reviews, your enjoyment of the game can be measured by how much you like Andrew Tate.