GTA 6 Costing As Much As $100 Could Help Video Game Industry Rebound In 2025, Analyst Says

[AddRat]

The whole "production costs have gone up" thing is such half-assed argument.

Publishers push for specific directions that the industry ends up taking and they are the ones in control of the budgets that have ballooned to extreme heights. Turning around and justifying a price increase on an issue that they have mostly pushed for is quite a publisher thing to do.

They are acting like these issues came from the heavens and landed in their laps and they now have to find a way to deal with them. As for the issues that are out of their hands, like inflation, they very conveniently forget that wages have not kept up with inflation and this is is not a B2B industry, the purchasing power of the consumer is half the equation.

And of course, a potential 100$ will not be followed by toned down microtransactions, which is often what they say they have to resort to to combat rising production costs when prices do not rise accordingly. Or Deluxe editions. Or gating cosmetic content that used to be available in game at the periods that they reference. All of that in the name of the "wellbeing of the industry" too, an industry that remembers its survival instincts only when they need to push for more revenue and not when they fire thousands of workers who actually make the games while barely touching CEO compensation packages.

That said, I do think there is a conversation to be made about flexible pricing for videogames. The problem is that this is not a conversation publishers are having. If they can raise the price with less-than-significant backlash, they will, that's about it. And they are probably looking at GTA5 as a trojan horse.

Rant aside, I don't see this change taking place yet as, like other posters mentioned, GTA and select few other games that could work as the initiators for such a thing do not need the upfront price to be that high if they are raking in money long-term through other means.