So who’s paying $100 for GTA 6 then?

[Assimilator]

I am deeply ashamed to say that I have spent more on a single character on Genshin Impact. I'm part of the problem.

I disagree, you're playing a gacha game with digital waifus, you knew going in this was a risk

On a related tangent, what happened to anime waifus in your avatar? Most interesting man in the world is boooring

 

[windwhirl]

Lmao it looks like the online part of GTA VI is going to cost extra, wow rockstar are really squeezing the rag this time.
https://www.gamingbible.com/news/gta-6-online-2-price-780410-20250124

I'd not pay for the online either, lol

 

[Assimilator]

If GTA6 does release at 100... How many people are gonna buy it at that price?

Millions.

If it turns out to be a flop because of the price, would other publishers still try to get closer to 100 (say 70/80/whatever)?

It's not gonna flop. Unfortunately.

 

[tpuuser256]

I had a blast with gta 5 but I was way younger. Today I don't really vibe with it, so definitely not getting it for 100 eur

 

[Fizban]

If GTA6 does release at 100... How many people are gonna buy it at that price? If it turns out to be a flop because of the price, would other publishers still try to get closer to 100 (say 70/80/whatever)?

Tens of millions.
GTA V has sold over 200 million copies. GTA VI will sell incredibly well, it's not even a question. The game's guaranteed to make them billions of dollars.

 

[theFOoL]

Indeed it will sell. Heck millions of people still online on GTA5. Twitch has thousands of streams

 

[eidairaman1]

Sorry but if people had sense nowadays to not spend money on shit like this, then prices would start to come down to sane levels for everyone

 

[theFOoL]

Sorry but if people had sense nowadays to not spend money on shit like this, then prices would start to come down to sane levels for everyone

Hmm that's your guess. I can only guess it's bc it's All the Wars and prices on pc components

 

[Fizban]

Sorry but if people had sense nowadays to not spend money on shit like this, then prices would start to come down to sane levels for everyone

$100 seems plenty sane to me. Games were $50 when I was a child. That's the NES era. People are mad about $70 now, a 40% increase. Meanwhile prices of most things doubled to tripled.

 

[Macro Device]

People are mad about $70 now

Not me though. I'm less than entertained by the fact the games became negative testosterone jelly, feels like they're too soft even for the ones deemed target audience. Screenwriting also sucks (or sometimes doesn't even exist), same can be said about QA. I don't mind paying $100, I do mind paying for a poorly made game.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

$100 seems plenty sane to me. Games were $50 when I was a child. That's the NES era. People are mad about $70 now, a 40% increase. Meanwhile prices of most things doubled to tripled.

I...see where you are coming from. Inflation is a thing, so about 30 years of 3% inflation would be 242.7%...ar about $50 game costing $121.

Now...here's the alternative answer.
1) You do not account for going from circuit boards and hardware to software only.
2) You do not account for massive increases in volume, because games have gone from a niche product to a mainstream one.
3) You don't account for massive decreases in complexity, given base tools are now industry standards. This isn't like the 90's where step one is writing the game's engine.
4) You don't account for the loss of physical distribution as a core cost.
5) You don't account for the loss of required quality. This is harder to quantify, but "we'll fix it with a patch" was unacceptable when you were a kid whereas today games launch with a litany of known bugs that might require a day one patch. If you're Bethesda, they might require your community to patch things for you while paid mods can be considered cannon and thus not break achievements. Yeah, salty about the Starfield garbage, where I purchase a game breaking device and it allows achievements, but I download a free visual overhaul and it's poison to being able to get dopamine drips from doing the content.


So...yeah. I look at this holistically as going from an expensive niche to a mass market item with virtually no costs for getting to consumers beyond your hosting...that is at or below what publishers charge to theoretically do the same. In that light, and with plenty of correctly planned games making bank, it's really hard to get behind someone wanting more money that is likely to pay unrelated tertiary entities (read: executives and marketing) that often hate the people who theoretically are their sales base. There's nothing like being told I'm an ist, phobe, or incel because I like me some pretty NPCs. Even DE went a little nuts over the whole "Nezha is a trap" thing because they designed a very androgynous form, while there is a slathering horde of people they joke about enjoying Mesa and Wisp due to their....assets. If that's the dual standard of the industry, then as far as I'm concerned they should eject the part of their teams that take offense, and pay the developers more to cram that "fanservice" into their games.



(For those that don't play Warframe, just google the names. In any 10 videos you'll find things like Mesa's chaps, Hildryn is muscle mommy, and some sick crap that shows terminal horniness. No judgement, but it is proof positive that even "enlightened" game companies still acknowledge that sex sells. Rockstart knows this, and if you disagree then explain to me how you've ever played GTA.)

 

[JIWIL]

Never played any Rockstar game for more than an hour or so. I haven't owned any post-90's consoles (apart from a PS3 for BD's) and, until recently, their PC ports were terrible.

Spent a little time on GTA5 but it was a touch too edgy/raunchy for me. Bought RDR2 and immediately realized my mistake because I never played RDR1 (see above).

Unlikely I'll pay any price >10$, let alone 100.

 

[rv8000]

Nope. GTA series peaked with 3/SA, been downhill and regurgitated garbage since like most AAA games.

There are very few games worth paying release price for, let alone steep discounts during steams sales.

EG and Tencent will also never receive a cent from me, sucks for Rockstar but I’m sure there are enough humans with maximal brain rot to throw money at rinse and repeat, cash grab, games.

 

[redeye]

I am deeply ashamed to say that I have spent more on a single character on Genshin Impact. I'm part of the problem.

GTA VI will be a console exclusive for the foreseeable future, anyway. Until Rockstar releases the PC version I won't be playing it.

I hit the spending limit in a month on second life for lindens… ten years ago, just for animation, clothes, dances… digital tchotchkes… and any AO’s Vista overrides makes and keep my subscription going for second life …
and in overwatch…
Yes, I don’t admit it, but sympathize with it.

 

[Upgrayedd]

It's not gonna flop. Unfortunately.

Unfortunately?? What a weird selfish response.

I'll probably buy two copies. One on Xbox then again on PC when it comes out.
I don't think it will be $100 either.

Never played any Rockstar game for more than an hour or so. I haven't owned any post-90's consoles (apart from a PS3 for BD's) and, until recently, their PC ports were terrible.

Spent a little time on GTA5 but it was a touch too edgy/raunchy for me. Bought RDR2 and immediately realized my mistake because I never played RDR1 (see above).

Unlikely I'll pay any price >10$, let alone 100.

RDR2 is a prequel. RDR1 is the sequel.

Imo GTA4 was the best. It was before mtx lowered the bar for the games industry as a whole.


What's amazing to me is the only trailer we've seen of the game is probably the worst it will ever look. For example, GTA V was first shown on PS3/360 and blew people away at the time. PS5 and Series X will be the same, the worst looking platforms but still very good for the time and replaced rather quickly by new hardware. I wonder how the new drives can keep up with loading the world, unlike the old laptop drives in the PS3/360.

 

[ty_ger]

If the past is an indicator, many will end up buying 3 different copies for various platforms.

 

[Frick]

Yeah after seeing how they milked GTAV I won't be paying full price for it. Most likely I'll buy it during discount, that is after I read the reviews of it. I only wanted to play single player portion of it.

Is it milking if people actively want it?

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

$100 seems plenty sane to me. Games were $50 when I was a child. That's the NES era. People are mad about $70 now, a 40% increase. Meanwhile prices of most things doubled to tripled.

Counterpoint: a game selling 500k copies was a wild success in the NES era. today, a game selling 4 million is considered a flop by major publishers.

In addition, the majority of sales are digital. No having to stock the game in store, print physical copies, ece. Cartridges were mad expensive to make, CDs substantially cheaper. It's never been cheaper to publish a game,a nd games can continue to sell among waves of popularity years after launch with no cost to the publisher.

Oh, and finally, these publishers are making RECORD PROFITS. I'll say that again: RECORD LEVELS OF PROFIT. That wouldnt be happening if the games were too cheap to survive in the modern economy.

so can we drop the whole "oh no the poor publishers they need more monies for da inflations" BS? They are rolling in dough. GTA V made enough profit to fund not just GTA VI, but VII and VIII as well, while still paying everyone. They could sell VI at $10 nd manage to make over a billion in profit, if V's sales are anything to go by.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Unfortunately?? What a weird selfish response.

I'll probably buy two copies. One on Xbox then again on PC when it comes out.
I don't think it will be $100 either.

RDR2 is a prequel. RDR1 is the sequel.

Imo GTA4 was the best. It was before mtx lowered the bar for the games industry as a whole.


What's amazing to me is the only trailer we've seen of the game is probably the worst it will ever look. For example, GTA V was first shown on PS3/360 and blew people away at the time. PS5 and Series X will be the same, the worst looking platforms but still very good for the time and replaced rather quickly by new hardware. I wonder how the new drives can keep up with loading the world, unlike the old laptop drives in the PS3/360.

You know, there's a lot of irony in you using that picture and not understanding why it would be unfortunate if bad decisions propagated throughout this industry because outliers could make them work.


Let me be a little less obtuse. RockStar spending a few years making GTA6 is very much different from most other AAA companies. Most of them will release the same level of cash grabbing full priced game, while tacking on an entire gatcha style transactions marketplace (more appropriate for a free-to-play game), and consider that the bump up to $100 is justified because RockStar did it. Extrapolating to that Brawndo picture you decided to use, it's like using electrolytes on plants...because the thirst mutilator is what they want. Everyone else will start using water with electrolytes, rapidly causing the plants (and gaming industry) to die by concentrating the salt.


You see, one bad decision will become the industry norm. That will be why it's bad RockStar does not fail with this, and reinforce to the industry as a whole that delivering the same product with decreasing quality, at an increasing price, is not acceptable. It's not a wish for RockStar to fail (at least on my part), but a wish that greed would be penalized rather than rewarded.

 

[tpuuser256]

Counterpoint: a game selling 500k copies was a wild success in the NES era. today, a game selling 4 million is considered a flop by major publishers.

In addition, the majority of sales are digital. No having to stock the game in store, print physical copies, ece. Cartridges were mad expensive to make, CDs substantially cheaper. It's never been cheaper to publish a game,a nd games can continue to sell among waves of popularity years after launch with no cost to the publisher.

Oh, and finally, these publishers are making RECORD PROFITS. I'll say that again: RECORD LEVELS OF PROFIT. That wouldnt be happening if the games were too cheap to survive in the modern economy.

so can we drop the whole "oh no the poor publishers they need more monies for da inflations" BS? They are rolling in dough. GTA V made enough profit to fund not just GTA VI, but VII and VIII as well, while still paying everyone. They could sell VI at $10 nd manage to make over a billion in profit, if V's sales are anything to go by.

Gaming seems more popular than ever but I legit don't know anyone spending money on real games (not fortnite or other online crap). Literally nobody. it's a big contrast to record profits..

 

[Upgrayedd]

You know, there's a lot of irony in you using that picture and not understanding why it would be unfortunate if bad decisions propagated throughout this industry because outliers could make them work.


Let me be a little less obtuse. RockStar spending a few years making GTA6 is very much different from most other AAA companies. Most of them will release the same level of cash grabbing full priced game, while tacking on an entire gatcha style transactions marketplace (more appropriate for a free-to-play game), and consider that the bump up to $100 is justified because RockStar did it. Extrapolating to that Brawndo picture you decided to use, it's like using electrolytes on plants...because the thirst mutilator is what they want. Everyone else will start using water with electrolytes, rapidly causing the plants (and gaming industry) to die by concentrating the salt.


You see, one bad decision will become the industry norm. That will be why it's bad RockStar does not fail with this, and reinforce to the industry as a whole that delivering the same product with decreasing quality, at an increasing price, is not acceptable. It's not a wish for RockStar to fail (at least on my part), but a wish that greed would be penalized rather than rewarded.

what's the bad decision? Making the most anticipated game of all time? Being the best at what they do? Putting forth actual effort?

Decreasing quality?? Did you not play RDR2?

You're complaining about other companies wanting the success R* has without the effort R* puts out. Industry doesn't die, low effort publishers kill their own long existing franchises is what happens.

You want this game to fail so you can have different genres of games from publishers that aren't R* is what you said. Selfish.

There's still monkey bars and hop scotch, R* is just the king of the sandbox.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I'll buy it when it's less than 1 usd unless it's way different than GTA 5 which I didn't like whatsoever.

I think they'd could get away with 80 it's going to sell a crazy amount of copies regardless they'll just do what every publisher does and have 100+ usd versions that include useless DLC

 

[Gameslove]

How long main story time?

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Gaming seems more popular than ever but I legit don't know anyone spending money on real games (not fortnite or other online crap). Literally nobody. it's a big contrast to record profits..

Your ignorance and anecdote do not equate to facts.


The facts are that publishers, who often own developers, have basically been reporting record profits for the last several years. This has coincided with announcing that and immediately firing huge amounts of the actual programmers and people working on games. Basically terminating the people who made the management so much money, because they are treated as a commodity rather than a sustainable resource.

For examples see:
Blizzard
MS
Activision (yes, listing separately because they are the same company but act partially differently)
Ubisoft....yes, record profits and record expenses do demonstrably lead to failure

You should be able to search more...but it's a 20 second google search. Likewise, developers like RockStar sell a full priced game, then spend pennies installing gatcha mechanics that belong in free to play. It's basically printing nearly free money.

what's the bad decision? Making the most anticipated game of all time? Being the best at what they do? Putting forth actual effort?

Decreasing quality?? Did you not play RDR2?

You're complaining about other companies wanting the success R* has without the effort R* puts out. Industry doesn't die, low effort publishers kill their own long existing franchises is what happens.

You want this game to fail so you can have different genres of games from publishers that aren't R* is what you said. Selfish.

There's still monkey bars and hop scotch, R* is just the king of the sandbox.

The bad decision, because you apparently cannot read, is that pricing everything at $100 is not sustainable.

You seem to be a bit thick, so let me explain this real simple. RockStar adding the free to play market to their full priced game is a bad decision. Despite this, they made a truckload of money. They support this by actively hunting down modders...something that Bethesda tried to introduce with paid mods in Skyrim and Fallout 4...that backfired spectacularly. If you miss the through-line, the problem is making a bad decision that will be used as the gold standard for the rest of the industry.

So you may also not be aware of this...but there are things called publisher. Publishers generally make a lot of money with little overhead...so they've taken to buying up companies that make games...because years between large cash infusions are very hard to sustain. If RockStar, owned by Take2, sets the industry standard at $100 being acceptable it'll be fine for Fallout 5, ES 6, Baldur's Gate 4, whatever Ubisoft open world is next, etc... to all cost that much, and it'll prevent people from buying. If instead people smacked a theoretical $100 GTA 6, RockStar would still print money from their gatcha shop and reprice the base game appropriately. That's what we like to call setting a sustainable precedent.



I'm betting in your world, because you seem to think things don't always come from somewhere else, that you believe tomorrow the next Basketball or Football game could suddenly raise its price and consumers would weigh whether or not to buy it. The thing is, that's not how average people work. Average people have a core set of things they purchase based off of interaction with other people, and will forego additional expenses if the core items become more expensive. IE, an increase in the price of eggs doesn't signal people will stop buying eggs, so much as they will go from buying steak to hamburger. This poisons the market for all steak producers. In this case eggs are the annual AAA releases, steak is a new AA game, and hamburger is deeply discounted games (or even piracy in the worst cases).


Let me not only provide you the above examples, but pull a direct comparison. Streaming was great with Netflix. They didn't have the newest shows, but they had no commercials and often cost less per month that two trips to a rental shop. Fast forward a few years, and everybody starts pulling the rights from Netflix to launch their own platforms. Prices remained low, because everyone wants market share. Fast forward again, and everyone is raising prices. Netflix set the precedent, so Disney, HBO, etc... all raised prices. Fast forward again and not only do we have price increases, but commercials. An idea from the age of the Wii was great, but constantly changing goals and bloated content creation budgets (sound familiar to video games?) have brought us to being more expensive than cable, with all its downside. Oh...and because you don't own anything the second you stop paying you lose everything. Every single step led to the next, because nobody pushed back. Now can you maybe see how RockStar pushing a $100 game might do the exact same? Bethesda did. Bethesda introduced horse armor, forcing you to download their creation club stuff but disabling it in your files, attempted to charge for third party made mods, and now will sell you back your achievements on anything you are willing to pay for on the consoles, including game breaking stuff that they initially said was the reason that mods disabled achievements.


Of course you're free to stick both your thumbs into your ears and yell that I'm wrong and not being fair....because I cannot spend the next several days documenting the slippery slope that this is, but I'll leave it to you. Care to join reality...or do you want to demonstrate that Idiocracy is prophetic rather than just a fun bit of movie? I'll wait for you Not Sure.

 

[Upgrayedd]

Your ignorance and anecdote do not equate to facts.


The facts are that publishers, who often own developers, have basically been reporting record profits for the last several years. This has coincided with announcing that and immediately firing huge amounts of the actual programmers and people working on games. Basically terminating the people who made the management so much money, because they are treated as a commodity rather than a sustainable resource.

For examples see:
Blizzard
MS
Activision (yes, listing separately because they are the same company but act partially differently)
Ubisoft....yes, record profits and record expenses do demonstrably lead to failure

You should be able to search more...but it's a 20 second google search. Likewise, developers like RockStar sell a full priced game, then spend pennies installing gatcha mechanics that belong in free to play. It's basically printing nearly free money.



The bad decision, because you apparently cannot read, is that pricing everything at $100 is not sustainable.

You seem to be a bit thick, so let me explain this real simple. RockStar adding the free to play market to their full priced game is a bad decision. Despite this, they made a truckload of money. They support this by actively hunting down modders...something that Bethesda tried to introduce with paid mods in Skyrim and Fallout 4...that backfired spectacularly. If you miss the through-line, the problem is making a bad decision that will be used as the gold standard for the rest of the industry.

So you may also not be aware of this...but there are things called publisher. Publishers generally make a lot of money with little overhead...so they've taken to buying up companies that make games...because years between large cash infusions are very hard to sustain. If RockStar, owned by Take2, sets the industry standard at $100 being acceptable it'll be fine for Fallout 5, ES 6, Baldur's Gate 4, whatever Ubisoft open world is next, etc... to all cost that much, and it'll prevent people from buying. If instead people smacked a theoretical $100 GTA 6, RockStar would still print money from their gatcha shop and reprice the base game appropriately. That's what we like to call setting a sustainable precedent.



I'm betting in your world, because you seem to think things don't always come from somewhere else, that you believe tomorrow the next Basketball or Football game could suddenly raise its price and consumers would weigh whether or not to buy it. The thing is, that's not how average people work. Average people have a core set of things they purchase based off of interaction with other people, and will forego additional expenses if the core items become more expensive. IE, an increase in the price of eggs doesn't signal people will stop buying eggs, so much as they will go from buying steak to hamburger. This poisons the market for all steak producers. In this case eggs are the annual AAA releases, steak is a new AA game, and hamburger is deeply discounted games (or even piracy in the worst cases).


Let me not only provide you the above examples, but pull a direct comparison. Streaming was great with Netflix. They didn't have the newest shows, but they had no commercials and often cost less per month that two trips to a rental shop. Fast forward a few years, and everybody starts pulling the rights from Netflix to launch their own platforms. Prices remained low, because everyone wants market share. Fast forward again, and everyone is raising prices. Netflix set the precedent, so Disney, HBO, etc... all raised prices. Fast forward again and not only do we have price increases, but commercials. An idea from the age of the Wii was great, but constantly changing goals and bloated content creation budgets (sound familiar to video games?) have brought us to being more expensive than cable, with all its downside. Oh...and because you don't own anything the second you stop paying you lose everything. Every single step led to the next, because nobody pushed back. Now can you maybe see how RockStar pushing a $100 game might do the exact same? Bethesda did. Bethesda introduced horse armor, forcing you to download their creation club stuff but disabling it in your files, attempted to charge for third party made mods, and now will sell you back your achievements on anything you are willing to pay for on the consoles, including game breaking stuff that they initially said was the reason that mods disabled achievements.


Of course you're free to stick both your thumbs into your ears and yell that I'm wrong and not being fair....because I cannot spend the next several days documenting the slippery slope that this is, but I'll leave it to you. Care to join reality...or do you want to demonstrate that Idiocracy is prophetic rather than just a fun bit of movie? I'll wait for you Not Sure.

I ain't reading all that lol