With the advent of the ninth console generation (which we are now five years into – take a second to sit down), the standard price of big-budget games has gone up from $60 to $70 – but with the biggest-budget game in recent memory now looming on the horizon, that could change even further. According to end-of-year reports put out by analysts like Matthew Ball, who heads an advisory firm that counts Epic Games, Meta and Netflix among its clients, the industry at large is hoping that GTA 6 will launch with an increased price, which would then give other companies pretext to do the same.
According to the report, there is "hope" within the video game industry that publisher Take-Two will use the unprecedented excitement around GTA 6 in order to bump up the default price of the game to $100.
It's believed that if Take-Two took this step with GTA 6, a game that will sell incredibly well regardless of the price, then others could follow suit, and potentially aid in recovering spiraling development costs.
GTA publisher Take-Two was one of the first to raise the price of games from $60 to $70 in 2020, using the transition to the next generation of consoles as an excuse. While it is likely that GTA 6 will be released with a $100 version as part of a line-up of various special editions, it's currently expected that the standard case game will be $70.
As the article points out, GTA 6 is going to be the best-selling video game of all time (or close to it) regardless of its price point – I know people who'd cut off a finger to play it right now. The rest of the industry following suit, however, is a harder pill to swallow. Take, for instance, Ubisoft. With the company in full-on crisis management mode following the underwhelming Star Wars Outlaws, it's hard to imagine them not beginning to charge more once the precedent is set, and are you really going to pay $100 for Assassin's Creed 30? Put another way, there are once-in-a-generation games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Baldur's Gate 3 that might merit a price point like that… and then there's Call of Duty.
It's true that the industry is going through turbulent times right now as it struggles through the live service era (mostly just the fact that no one actually wants live service games that aren't called Helldivers 2). The answer to that is large studios caring about their employees and customers and respecting their time more, not less. As goes the immortal saying: I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding.
Previously: Another GTA 6 leak, another tantalizing disappointment