This seems fine given the scale of the game and assuming it's not bad, but it's more worrying how it will lead to $100 shovelware five years from now. We already had Zelda at $70 (also worth it) so i could see a trend forming.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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People pay $1200 for an iPhone. I'm sure they'll pay the $100 for a game. How? I'm not sure but they always seem to.
Personally, I don't but I am never the trend setter.
They offer payment plans for a cell phones I'm waiting for the day that they start offering payment plans to purchase video games. They've already trialled with it with the hardware with the Xbox Series X launch with their all access pass, which don't get me wrong was a great deal but, eventually we are going to hit the point where the everyday person if they want to buy a video game is going to have to do one of those by now pay later plans through like affirm or something, which is a scary thought. As is if it gets much higher than $100 it will qualify for paypals 6-month equal financing deal if you have their credit card, if this change had been just 6 months prior it would have already been qualified for it because they just recently raised their minimum so I think it's like $120 or $140
"According to Matthew Ball's The State of Video Gaming in 2025 presentation, first spotted by VGC, some developers "hope" the next installment in the GTA franchise will be priced at $80–$100, fully capitalizing on its status as the most anticipated game on the market. This increase, the report suggests, would allow studios to raise the price of their own new games by at least $10 to offset declining player numbers and inflation while justifying the change by pointing to GTA VI's example."
Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?
No, what's going to happen is that, with so many game sales happening every week, people are largely going to wait for the sales axe to come down on GTA VI until it's affordable. The only people who'd happily buy GTA VI at that price point, are gullible FOMO-pearl-clutching "gamurs", gaming "journalists", benchmark nerds and egotistical Day-1 flaunters. That's about it.
The moment GTA VI hits a single sale, then most will jump on it.
I rarely spend more than 15 eurodollars on a game, but realistically for the average cough console cough player the difference between 60 and 80 is a few beers with your pals, and you spend way more time playing GTA than drinking those few beers.
While I wish you were right, something tells me that even with an 80-100$ pricetag it'll still be one of the most successful games ever released.
Look at diablo4, for example. 70$ base game, 90 for deluxe, and 100 for ultimate plus mtx in the store at stupid prices. And apparently it's sold over 6 million copies and made over 600 mil in revenue in the first week. And it's not even a good game, in my opinion.
I'll shamefully admit that I would've bought Diablo IV at launch. But the dealbreaker for me was when they made it online-only, like Diablo III. Good preventative measure.
Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?
Gonna guess the tens of thousands getting laid off who are anxiously waiting for money to come back to the business so they can get hired again.
VERY educated guess, there.
If these hypothetical developers are waiting for cash infusions to "fix" the finances of thesw disastrously managed companies, then they're pretty naïve. Successful games are making multi-millions, even middling franchise games can pull that. More than enough to sustain a normal sized development team.
I imagine maintaining a reasonable team would result in fewer unemployed developers than overbloating the team thinking "more is biggerer is more money" and then cutting tens of thousands of positions for "costs."
would allow studios to raise the price of their own new games by at least $10 to offset declining player numbers
Wonder how much they'll raise it next when they lose additional sales to absurd prices.
I mean, I'd be pissed but I'd probably still buy it, providing it was fully playable offline and the content reflected the price. I play GTA when it releases, beat it, fool around a bit and never touch it again. The last time I spent money on gta was when V released on 360, more than 10 years ago.
It’s surprising that games are getting cheaper compared to the cost of living. If you take into consideration the fact that games are becoming more expensive to produce, I really don’t understand it.
Gaming is way cheaper for me than it was during the ps2 or ps3 era.
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if it's higher than $60, R* can lick my taint.
in fact, if the online is as ridden with issues as 5's online has been, I'll probably just pirate it. Why would I want to pay $60+ just so I can get squeezed for even more money via microtransactions; and having to pay even more for a mod menu, just to exist in a server without being hassled? Fuck that with a rusty fork.
Remember when Apple released the $1000 phone and it was a big thing?
Eventually this will be the normal.
I can tell you right now I'm not paying AUD$160 for a new game in the near future
Why pirate shitty AAA games when you can spend your time getting a better experience by supporting indie devs financially and in word of mouth?
Word of mouth provided by pirates is still great for the AAA games industry, regardless of what they'll tell you, and only helps perpetuate these bad practices you're pirating to get away from. 99.9% of users are unwilling to pirate games, and thus when you reference them, say you played or enjoyed them, talk about pirating them, etc., it's essentially just free advertising for those games to people who would in all likelihood just purchase them if they wanted them.
Meanwhile, playing indie games gives those devs some cash flow to keep developing and gives free, word of mouth advertising to other people through references, recommendations, etc. The more successful indie games with good practices are, the better the games industry as a whole. It's not a zero-sum game, but there is some tradeoff involved.
Game budgets are crazy. In order to get the profits shareholders want they'll charge as much as they can get away with.
Indies are actually performing well, so we might see a shift like we saw with film in the 90s.
I mean... yeah, give it a long enough time and it will be. Kinda how inflation works. "Eventually" is a pretty expansive word.
I'm pretty sure most major games have MSRPd for $60 since the 90s
Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.
In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.
But it's true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there's no way to cut costs on distribution (you're already subsidizing storage, it's just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there's no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.
And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.
Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn't prices will "evenutally" go up, it's that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That's probably more likely.
This is some weird reporting.
For one thing, I'm not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I'd be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.
For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called "retail packaged goods" games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That's 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.
That's two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can't even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that's 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.
So basically GTA or no, I don't see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It's MTX-fests or nothing. It's pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you'll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.
So... pick your poison, I suppose.
I have paid full price for a game in 10 years and GTA6 will be late to the PC party anyway. Looks like I won’t be playing it until 2035.