On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down
On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down
I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven't started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way
And it's an impossible equation for most Americans to pay more. Especially if things continue to downward spiral.
Where's my eye patch?
We can't make less money! I promised Susan a new yacht^[Obviously with two heliports, olympic swimming pool, on-board beer brewery, bowling alley, crew of 20, escort yacht for utilities - just the bare necessities, nothing fancy.] for her name day!
Meanwhile I'm still enjoying Schedule I, which is made by a single dev and has "low quality" graphics by choice. We don't need AAA games left and right; we need good, fun ones with strong foundations. Games that don't demand paid DLC, or season passes, or fucking Shark Cards.
I truly understand that Rockstar is under a lot of pressure as the creator/publisher of GTA. But not every company/developer needs to be like them.
According to SEC filings, Take Two Interactive studio made 2.241 Billion USD profit in 2024.
Did they release anything of note in 2024? Presumably the annual slog2k sports.
Yes, in fact the report specifically mentions that NBA 2k24 outperformed expectations. Other than that they're probably earning passively off of older titles and GTA V microtransactions.
Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?
Maybe stop spending nigh decades and nigh billions of dollars designing these enormous catch all games that are supposed to appeal to everyone?
I Don't want to spend 90 dollars on a game that has 400 different things to do, 200 of which I enjoy.
I'd rather give Sandfall 50 bucks for a lovingly crafted, focused game that's actually, you know, good.
If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.
Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.
Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!
I've been saying it for the last decade, there's no real "games are too expensive to make" problem. There's only studios choosing the "go big or go home" death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they're going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it's not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.
But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they've been at it since at least mid 2000s. It's only in the recent years where it's really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They're feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.
Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let's get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.
on top of all that; big money, be it profits or revenue, attracts parasites that start ruining the company from the inside. One can feel it on many games that developers wanted to do good but were prevented from doing so because of executives and middle management.
Not only that, they produced a game with no major flaws with a tiny (comparable to these mega studios) team AND NO COMPROMISES.
“Man, this game is great but the music is meh” - not at Sandfall.
“Wow, I love the combat but the graphics are dated” - nope, every model is so lovingly crafted they added haircuts and outfits as secret loot
“The combat is the only weak point in this gorgeous, story driven game” not on expedition 33 it ain’t!
It seems like there’s a few studios that get this trick. Hazelight (Split Fiction, It Takes Two) seems to have a good cadence to releases and likely hasn’t inflated their size all that much. They’re consistently making good games.
I wish there were more examples of that.
The company made over 5 billion revenue and spent over 2 billion cost of operating in 2024, I don't think this has anything to do with affordability.
Not sure I follow sir/ma'am - are you saying R* doesn’t have to price it at 90$ and they’ll still make money?
I mean that’s true, but publicly traded companies are the devil themselves and are required to make as much money as possible.
Came here to say this. Stop trying the build the whole universe in a game.
There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.
But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.
Maybe you aren't excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.
Going purely by "vibes"? I could be "okay" with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.
I’m glad they’re excited for it, but I’d put money on the fact that they’re not excited for literally every facet of the game, which is my entire point.
I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can. The problem is R* thinks the way to design a game is to include 500 things, make the game take nearly a decade and cost nearly a billion dollars to produce - that game has to sell at 90 bucks, and it’s bloated with a ton of shit I don’t care about.
I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (see: expedition 33, JRPG fans) than 40 extra dollars for a bunch of shit I don’t care about in a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator.
Edit: remember bowling with Nico? The train mission? Flying in general? All shit people paid for that actively annoyed them.
At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about, all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.
GTA 6 is just going to be client app to a universe of micro transactions. They should probably just give it away free.
I don't even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
How about buying only one or two dolls for their kids?
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
Lmao who would believe that gta 6 is not going to make an absolute bank? They could give it away for free and still make more money that they could spend.
People expect games that are ever more ambitious
Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn't have anything to do with ambition.
People praise expedition 33, that game might as well be an xbox 360 game and it people would still absolutely love it.
Exactly. Look at Nintendo. A fun game doesn’t mean you have to have bleeding edge visuals.
He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they'll get £0. I'll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I'm sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren't, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they're not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that's make or break for the studio.
Many, if not most, AAA games are actually somewhat risky investments for studios. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.
Is corporate greed a huge problem? Yes. But also, when you’re investing $200mill+ over 5 years for a $60 product, you need to sell a fuck ton to make it work. Literally millions of copies. And there isn’t enough buying power right now in particular for everyone to make it.
So, their solution is to charge $90 (lets not kid ourselves, the premium, deluxe, anticipated access, special edition is going to be over $120), so even less people buy it?
LMAO, Rockstar made 9 billion dollars off GTAV micro-transactions. Fuck that noise, ain't no one crying for billionaires. They could finance and market more than 40 different $200 million games, then give them away for free, and still break even! This is pure greed.
That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.
Absolutely no way Take-Two can afford anything less than $5B in profit every year. The stock market was a mistake.
If you really want me to pay $100 for a game, you gotta raise the bar to the fuckin stratosphere compared to what we're getting now.
And get me a damn raise.
And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn't mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they're complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
Yea. I refuse to buy any game that tries to sell me microtransactions, battlepasses or really anything these days. If the sticker price does not cover the full experience, it's just not worth the hassle.
Sorry, best we can do is microtransactions, fear of missing out and AI slop. That'll be $90.
Precisely this. If Baldur's Gate 3 was 100$, I still would have bought it in a heartbeat because I know that the developers are never gonna ask for any more of my money.
I would say gta is one of the only few games I would pay that much for and I know I’ll get my moneys worth, but I’m not interested in gta online. I wish we could get story dlc like we did with gta 4
Shame on Harvey Randall for platforming executive bullshit:
The problem, he puts it, is inflation. Which is an unerringly boring but also correct answer: "We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation."
They're not responding to the expectations of the people; they're responding to the expectations of their investors.
if rockstar really wanted to win over all gamers, even the ones not planning to play gta, they announce base gta 6 at 50. and then have the 'early/access-10 min early-uber shark complete edition with a unique purple skin at 100 or whatever the fuck they think the whole things worth.
Look. I think all AAA companies should do $120 base price for all games. Piracy would have such a boom. Better platforms. many more seeders and good reviews and more freaks hell bent on cracking DRM.
That’s hilarious. To your point, I wasn’t going to pay $50 for this, I sure as hell won’t pay $80.
Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.
Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.
Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.
Heard the same crap about how these "full price games" would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction
This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won't be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.
ROFL the more games go $80 to 90 dollars for a base game version, the more I wait for sales. 70 dollars was bad enough in my opinion, but this greed fueled jump is going to put off more potential buyers than it will bring in. It's my genuine hope that this blows up in their face and will force them to price games reasonably again. Perhaps if the money they made in sales wasn't mostly funneled into their overpaid CEOs and shareholders, perhaps they'd have more money to cover development costs and keep game prices stable. Sounds like a personal problem to me.
Go ahead. I’m back to piracy where needed and patient gaming where possible. These clowns played themselves. AAA games are unreasonable nowadays.
Yeah? I’ll buy it when it’s on sale for $35 and they’ll profit, so it’s all good. Patience is a virtue and all that.
They'll charge whatever they think people will pay, and I'm pretty confident that many millions of people will fork over the $80 - $90 at launch. Prices come down when people stop buying.
Eh, this game was never in the cards for me anyway. I decided years ago to never give Rockstar another dime when they didn't release any single player DLC for GTA5. Fuck that noise.
Wut? We're mad now about not getting DLC? GTA V was a great game that's still a blast today. I spent many evenings in front of my PS3 playing the single player for years, never touched GTA: O once and never felt the need to and still believe I got my $60 back in 2013 out of it.
Similar story with RDR 2. Unless GTA 6 is a huge step down from both those games in single-player playability (I'll wait for reviews obv), I'm not going to lose much sleep over spending $20 more than I spent 13 years ago for the previous game.
GTA V was originally planned to have a number of single-player DLC campaigns akin to the ‘Lost and the Damned’ and ‘Ballad of Gay Tony’ for GTA IV.
This is what people - including me - are bitter about; the immense financial success of GTA:O (namely Shark cards) diverted all resources away from additional single-player content.
I wouldn’t have minded paying for an additional perspective campaign (like GTA IV) or an additional post-campaign chapter heist. GTA V was a complete experience at launch, so additional DLC content would have been welcomed by the community - DLC only becomes problematic when it is clearly part of the core experience, but arbitrarily removed in order to charge more.
Unfortunately, due to having to prioritise shareholder returns - investing resources into anything beyond the most immediately profitable route (ie. online) leaves the board and C-suite open to litigation, because as we should have all learned by now from this series, Capitalism will ultimately ruin everything in search for more and more profits.
If I'm remembering correctly, they had announced single player DLC bit instead just chose to develop more multiplayer stuff since that's where the big bucks are. I'm busy and don't have a source right now, but can attempt to find this later and edit as necessary.
Lol never seen anyone upset that a publisher put all the games content into the base game.
As of a year ago, GTA 5 had made over $9,000,000,000.
That's a billion with a B.
Mostly off micro transactions to children.
They don't need to charge $90, but if people will pay it, they'll charge it.
Yet again proves that capitalism is a cancer, and they’ll never be happy with anything, except for endless exponential growth
The kinda prices a Mario Kart, Pokemon, or GTA can maybe ask for. Try that on a Star Wars Outlaws and the sales nosedive, I reckon.
I think the industry is gonna try to normalize these prices and crash pretty hard, cause they’ll budget their productions thinking they can sell for 90 bucks but forget they‘re neither GTA nor Mario Kart.
Then again, Dynasty Warriors Origins is 79 on Steam, I wonder how that performed for KOEI.
Every games is free if you know where to look
I mean. Yeah. When Goldeneye came out for the N64 it was like $90 and that was in nintiesbux. We got real used to standardized pricing when discs came around but it's true that you can't have it both ways. Now, there's a reasonable argument to be had over whether Mario Kart World and GTA6 are both gonna be worth >$80. I bought Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey for whatever they retailed for. Was that $70? I can't remember. But I had more fun and put more hours that year into Hollow Knight, which cost me $15 and kept dumping free DLC for like a year or so afterward. The price was great. The DLC was free. But it also didn't cost like $2bln or whatever dumbass cost they're saying GTA6 cost to make.
I didn't ask them to make it that stupid big and expensive. But some fans did. They're in that Smash Bros situation where they aren't allowed not to top the previous entry in terms of scope. So it is what it is.
Should all games be $80-90? Of course not. Should games that cost a billion or more to develop and promise hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay cost $80-90? I think it's embarrassing and immature to suggest otherwise. Even if you just go back to 2006 and the $60 standard, and adjust that for inflation, you end up at $95. So this isn't really an argument any serious person should be having when we talk about whether the most expensive game ever made should cost functionally less than its Xbox 360 forerunner.
