Look, the reason "indie" games tend to cost less than AAA games isn't simply because they're called "indie." It's because they tend to have fewer man-hours put into them and require a lot less revenue to turn a profit. Sure perceived value is a big factor too, and I think all Sony has done to present NMS has placed a high perceived value in it in the eyes of many people. I'm just noticing that a lot of people have forgotten what "indie" used to entail beyond the word itself.
When you're paying for a game, you're not really paying for the amount of content that's in it. That's what makes a game valuable to a lot of people, but what you're really paying for is all the money and man-hours that went into building that game. You have to factor in that plus how much the developer or publisher actually expects the game to sell. Unfortunately, we don't know any of that information. We don't know what NMS's total budget is and we don't know how much Sony or Hello Games expects it to sell.
For a comparison though, open-world survival games like Stranded Deep or The Long Dark have to start at low price points because they're breaking into Early Access with basically zero notoriety, and have to have a low asking price to entice people. To me it seems like NMS was originally going to try to stay low-key until its launch, but is instead getting noticed a lot more due to being on two E3 press conference stages as well as Conan. It's development budget however is still probably really low -- probably in line with the upper-tier indie games and some of the Kickstarter games. It's possible Sony could find a big-ass marketing campaign for it though. At that point $60 would become much more likely.
I'm just trying to talk about what the actual factors behind game pricing are. The actual amount of "content" in the game probably has less of an impact than people seem to think in terms of cost to the developer and publisher. That's how games like Titanfall and Star Wars Battlefront can end up being $60.
