GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100
GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100
Allegedly, studios "hope" Rockstar will raise the price of its upcoming title to set a precedent.
some developers "hope" the next installment in the GTA franchise will be priced at $80–$100
Management are NOT DEVELOPERS.
Executives are NOT DEVELOPERS.
Shareholders are NOT DEVELOPERS.
Yeah, I guarantee you not a single developer gives two shits about how much the game costs. It's not going into their pockets regardless.
That's not true. I've been a developer for 18 years on big AAA and small indie games. Most people I've worked with very much cared about pricing. When you work on a game and put years of hard work into it, you want it to be a success. If the game is not profitable, you might lose your job so of course you care when management shows up with a pricing strategy that doesn't make sense to you. Sure, passion is a big part of making games but it's also our job and we're not oblivious to what the game we're working on is worth.
Oh and yes, we do get bonuses based on the performance of the game.
I'm loving the balls on studios. Yesterday we had "experts" suggesting it might cost 100 bux, and today it's already the beggining of a trend. And the game isn't even out. In fact, we only have the trailer for the game and they're already predicting prices.
My prediction is yes, they'll ask 100$ and more, and yes, people will pay it.
But the nerve, I swear. "Yeah, our games have gotten sloppier every year. And yes, we fired tens of thousands solely for profit reasons. But line must go up, so you better start paying"
Do you really think people will buy it? I've played most of the GTAs, but I'm not about to spend 100 dollars on a video game.
There's enough people in what I assume to be big gaming communities, like active and paying and stuff, that are defending this, citing that other stuff got more expensive, too... and somehow not many agree that incomes have not risen proportionally. Them temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Somehow I think that most people defending this kind of crap are too young to actually have a first-hand feeling of how much prices for everything have risen.
My prediction is yes, they’ll ask 100$ and more, and yes, people will pay it.
Well the game could be disastrous and sell poorly after the first week.
To be honest, they could launch the game as a 1 MB file that brings you to a black screen that says get fucked, and they would still make their money's worth just out of the people who will blindly buy the game because they've been waiting for GTA 6 for so long that they bought it release day.
And then they could just move back to GTA V pretending nothing happened because the same people that would have impulse purchased GTA 6 with zero research are also the people who play GTA V religiously spending money on the micro transactions there and that isn't going to cut their addiction
Honestly this could all be a campaign from Rockstar to get ahead of higher pricing. They throw out $100 to some random people and let them run with it, so when they announce a $80/$90 price tag everyone bregurdingly goes along with it.
That's what I'm thinking. Get the fanbase used to seeing 100+, and then suddenly an 80$ game will feel like a bargain lol
I honestly believe it, these test the water kind of leaks, more like intentionally invisible marketing to see the reactions
I think rumours about the price tag were already going before the trailer even came out lol.
Looks like PatientGamers' membership numbers will be on the rise soon.
I never pay full price for a game.
Always running sales. If they aren't just check history or set an alert on isthereanydeal and wait a bit.
This is the way.
Thank you for the first link, kind stranger.
I don't even buy a game when it's 70...
At 80 there is no fucking way...
90, are they crazy? Never!
100? Lulz, go fuck yourself lunatic
I think there is maybe 1 game that I would consider spending 100 for the base game. And that's because I love the series and it is very much a long term game for me, Street Fighter.
But that would be a very tough sell, it would have to be something really special to part with that much, even though I know I would get 1000s of hours out of it
You already spend more than 100 for Street Fighter and always have. The full roster for SF6 is currently 100/110 bucks. Not counting MTX and extra cosmetics.
Sure, you didn't pay it all at once, but that's no different than me buying SF2 and then Super SF2 the following year, each for seventy-ish bucks.
Fuck you.
Thats a no from me dawg
Ubisoft I've just had an idea to win players back
Just a reminder that you can play AAA titles until you die and never pay more than $15 per game, if you wait for a couple years and a sale.
Patient gaming ftw, I was able to get GTAV for free from epic games (only reason to have that stupid app)
Hell, I got GTA V for free (legally, yes). It was the first GTA game I played, and I think its launch reviews were massively overrated.
I doubt I'll find a free deal for GTA VI, but I ain't buying it new.
Just a reminder that no one's forcing you to spend $100 on the game. If enough people refuse to do so the base cost of the game will go down again. Icarus is my most recent for example, I've had it on my wish list for almost a year and a half now, because I wasn't willing to spend $35 on what that game provided. It's currently on sale on Steam for $9.
God of War 2018 is currently $20 on PSN
I got Elden ring for $30 a few months back despite the fact that it's still selling full price at 60.
If y'all are patient and wait they stopped making money on the game which means that they lower the cost to try to incentivize people to buy it.
Plus the first year of sale of a game is The Game's most important release window, because companies generally will use the first year to decide how popular it was. If enough people refuse to buy the game at their original price point it will destroy their sales metric for the first year which will make it harder on the studio to justify to their parent company that it's worth making another game, which means that they're more incentivized to lower the base cost of the game within the first year of launch.
The rate of this is significantly slowed down if everyone is just like oh okay I guess it's $100 now and then buys it anyway, have patience and hold out, especially a game like GTA 6 where they're going to gain more money off microtransactions then people actually buying the game. Honestly GTA 6 probably should have just been sold as a free to play because they operate like one
The thing is, universal action like this, even on a fraction of the scale necessary to make a dent and ultimately change things, just doesn’t work because people will always bow to capitalism. They’ll kick the dirt and grumble under their breath as they pull out their wallets.
I know you’re saying just wait until it’s on sale, but the power of “keeping up with the joneses” is unfortunately a tried a true way of capitalism. When people are talking about the game in the first weeks and posting memes and making in-jokes, people that were trying to hold out will cave like a poorly managed mining operation.
Playing lots of RPGs and Jrpgs has trained my Patience. I never buy a game at full price, regardless of how much I want it. I simply wait for a sale until it's below 35 euro.
Why do they always say developers instead of publishers?
Because they want you to complain about the developers and not their corporate overlords.
Hot take, a very few games are actually worth the 100$ pricetag. The wrong studios believe their games are worth that much tho. I can see myself buying gta6 for 100 but id probably wait for a good sale lol
I decided to go all out with Monster Hunter Wilds and got the ultimate digital deluxe or whatever. Does it smart? Yes. But the amount of hours I’ve put into World and Rise would make you blush and yell at me to go touch grass. It’s one of the few things I absolutely will not play Patient Gamer with.
GTA VI is another such game. The amount of time I’ve put into V since it dirst came out to PS360, you don’t even want to know.
Unless you do. Then I’ll go look it up.
I've definitely found games that I thought were worth $100, and they often refuse to even go as high as $70. Probably the only one that I thought was worth $100 and charged that much for it was Street Fighter 6.
Id much rather pay 100$ for an mmo and get all the nonsense battlepasses they do 'for life', feels better to 'own' it
I’ll pay 100 dolars for gta vi blindly, but studios dont realize that trust is earned.
Well that's a ripe take on this. Evidently you don't know anyone who runs Linux and played GTA V online. Rockstar can fuck right off for what they pulled. Definitely didn't earn any trust, and Windows users should be wary as well since they did that with no notice and no fucks given to a portion of their paid users.
No game is worth that price point.
Exactly. Even a game like Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3 isn't worth 100$ and those are really great fucking games.
I got games i have 1k+ hours in, id pay a hunnid fir that nuch entrmertainment.
They can price them at €200 for all I care. I’ll only will buy them when they are at €20 anyway.
It might inspire me to continue not wasting my money, and buying everything on sale, if it's worth it at all
It'll inspire me to never buy it...until of course it goes on sale for $20 a year later.
This is the way.
I always wait for the prices to drop before buying any game, and never ever pre-buy them. The only exception is early access from indie devs, I'll help them along if they show promise.
My jolly roger has been stuffed in a trunk somewhere for years, but looks like it might be coming out...
Nowadays it takes like a year or 2 for devs to fix all the bugs anyway. People who buy on day one or pre-order are suckers.
It'll make calculating steam sale prices quite easy, won't it?
Yeah, they won't appear cuz they're all ignored 😂
Im not spening $100 on a fucking video game. I dont care what game ,i don’t care what edition.
I'm not paying if its not below $30, why would i pay for $100? GTA 5 is already disappointing i'm pretty sure they chop even more thing up and make most content online only. $100 is already rm450 in my country and that's almost 1/3 of minimum wages, I'll continue to be stingy and spend my money on better stuff.
They deserve piracy.
How is GTA5 disappointing? I remember playing it a couple of years after release and it still is one of the best open world games I ever played. Even now, more than 10 years since I played it, I remember the main characters and even some secondary ones and part of the story (even though I only played it once). If anything, I think the GTA5 model is what all "service" games should be -- excellent story and single player campaign and..whatever that online thing is. Frankly, I've never touched the online part in GTA5 but I hear it's quite successful.
Regarding the price, I would personally probably pay a bit more for a really really good game. I don't think the very good games selling for a premium are the problem, but the unfinished, reskinned and shitty games selling for 60-70. Like, how is Elden Ring released at the same price as Skull and Bones or FIFA <current-year>? Those should be 10-20 bucks, not the good games (assuming GTA6 will keep the quality bar up).
Frankly, I’ve never touched the online part in GTA5 but I hear it’s quite successful.
The microtransactions kept a very steady flow of hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter to Rockstar, so yeah, it's absurdly successful
I'm glad you enjoy it and my opinion of it doesn't negate your feeling, however i should say i find the middle part of the story to be very bland and the ending is forgettable. We're also sold on the idea of heist but we only have the grand total of 5, which again, i find it very forgettable and bland.
In fact i still can remember a lot of San Andreas, but i can't remember much about gta5.
Not a big fan of the idea of spreading the story focus amongst the trio too, i think i'd enjoy more if it's just focus on Franklin.
The post game is also pretty empty, not much side story to do because they put their effort on online mode.
Overall it's a pretty mid game to me.
can't play online without hacks unfortunately. sad state of affairs. but overall, game wasn't bad except for the money grab with sharkbucks
This is my ideology as well, not the piracy part but the I refuse to buy a game for more than $30 and that game better have rocked the internet in terms of how amazing it was. For prospective the last game that I purchased for $30 was Elden ring when it went on sale a few months back and the last one prior to that was satisfactory when it launched on epic games
This just in: rich people want to get richer by charging more for the same product.
AAA games can go suck my cock and balls. I'm not playing games anymore. I got no time. No energy. No money.
What? Don’t you want to make it your second job? The live service game experience? /s
Heck make them $250, i'm not buying them even at $70.
If a game is over $30 it needs to be damn good to get me to buy it.
I think the last two games I bought at some high premium launch price were GTAV and Cyberpunk 2077.
That second one still stings. I played it longer than I should've probably because of the price, and I've not bothered with the DLC, even though people said it fixed the game. The price just left a bad taste in my mouth.
For $100, it better have a strip club achievement that comes with a coupon for a free actual lap dance.
"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 $10 to offset declining player numbers and inflation while justifying the change by pointing to GTA VI's example."
Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?
No, what's going to happen is that, with so many game sales happening every week, people are largely going to wait for the sales axe to come down on GTA VI until it's affordable. The only people who'd happily buy GTA VI at that price point, are gullible FOMO-pearl-clutching "gamurs", gaming "journalists", benchmark nerds and egotistical Day-1 flaunters. That's about it.
The moment GTA VI hits a single sale, then most will jump on it.
While I wish you were right, something tells me that even with an 80-100$ 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.
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.
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.
For $15 you can have endless hours or fun with Balatro
I wish I could, but it's just not for me.
It wasn't for me either at first but I gave it another shot and it got its hook into me.
What helped me was looking up a scoring/basic strategy guide that helped me figure out what super rookie mistakes I was making - this gave me a better eye for strategy when I was playing, which in turn translated to me enjoying the deck building aspect (which is a mechanic I know I enjoy).
The game is good, and really great to pick up and put down in busts if you don't have a lot of time.
Hope you end up liking it eventually! I LOVE poker of all types, rogue likes, and deck builders so I thought this was a smash hit when I heard about it, but yeah, took a while to love it.
Lol, I'll just wait until it's on sale for 5 bucks. I'm patient enough.
AAA developers will inspire me to not buy their shit.
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
That's why I pirste first and pay later when it's on sale for $20
And this is precicely why I mostly play indie titles made by individuals or small teams that are sold for under 10 bucks. Fuck this noise.
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.
if it’s higher than $60,R* can lick my taint.FTFY
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
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.
how incredibly american to phrase learning they can get away with fleecing people for $40 more as being "inspired".
I wonder… Will Grand Theft Auto VI be the next “AAAA” game? Or have we ditched that term now since the utter failure of the first game that dared wear that title?
Not fucking happening. I wouldn’t pay £100 for any game.
GTA 6 Devs: look at our amazing story and open world!
YouTubers: I'ma drive an alligator up off this ramp, skip off the tallest building, and then land on a blimp!
Idk what an open world is for if not the alligator-building-blimp strat.
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.
We still have a ways to go before reaching the inflation-adjusted, $150-per-game peak of mass market games in the 1990's. A key difference is games back then had way higher marginal cost (it's near zero now).
The interesting thing is that the market is becoming a lot more like it was back then, full of people that only buy one or two games a year and only play those. Of course now, the model is retaining players with DLC and MTX, whereas in 1995 it was more because people could only afford one or two games a year.
It'll push a shit ton of new pirates, thus creating more headaches for them if $100 games become the new normal. It's almost like they love shooting themselves in the feet with a shotgun and then blaming everyone else as to why they can't walk like they used to.
If GTA6 is $100 for the basic copy I hope absolutely nobody buys it.
I imagine there will be a premium version that's $100 plus but I can't imagine that they'll risk trying to sell it at that price for the base version. People aren't exactly running around with disposable income right now, at least in the US.
It will be funny if they make it free to play because they think maximizing player count will translate into more shark card money than box price + shark cards. Not that I think that is likely, just a funny possibility.
AAA games are already $90CAD here with deluxe/special editions going for $120-$160. I can't remember the last time I actually bought one of those games because most of them are trash designed to exploit the player as much as possible. There are a lot of other hobbies I'd rather drop that kind of money on that respect my time heaps more than modern games.
I think Tiny Glade is the only game I play regularly that is an actual new release. Everything else is 5+ years old because I got them on sale for good prices. Also means they're already patched up and usually perform better instead of having people pay $90+ to beta test broken garbage.
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.
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.
Rockstar I would say is one of the few that can demand that price. I would pay $100.00 bucks cause Im going to play it for the next decade. We could be on GTA15 but rockstar dont roll that way.
Yeah, and we have inflation going on, prices are going to increase. That's not a crazy price for a game you'll enjoy for years - if it's not broken when it's released. If you pay that money and have to wait for months of patches you'd prob be a bit pissed off.
I spent 20$ on the last game i played, and put over 140 hours into it. Just saying.
I still have a huge backlog of games released in the last 30 years, so I can really easy wait for every game to go into sale. There is absolutely no need or urge for me to buy any game on release.
Arrrr, alexa play despacito
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.
They can try, but it might not work. GTA VI has been in development for like more than a decade and will probably have loads of content. I could see $100 being justified. But not every other AAA game would be the same. Most wouldn’t in fact.
That said, video games have been $50-60 for the last 25 years. If they’d kept up with inflation, they’d be close to $110. So, I get it.