In the U.S., maybe a few hundred thousand, and then a few hundred thousand more elsewhere. Even the biggest system-sellers in history have only moved about that much (perhaps discounting major launch titles, but since there's no prior sales periods or other useful data points to compare against, it can be hard to measure the effects of those games). With one exception, mainline GTA games have had at least some measurable impact on sales since the series jumped to 3D on the PS2 and became a mega-hit.
San Andreas had the biggest effect of the three Gen 6 GTA games, and so far the biggest effect of any GTA game to date on any single system. It sold a bit over 2M copies on the PS2 in its launch month of Oct. 2004 in the U.S. PS2 hardware sales that month increased to over 380k, up from 253k units the previous month. Even accounting for September being a 5-week sales period, that's a solid 87.7% increase. But numerically it's not astronomical. If we by weekly average sales, then maybe around 175-180k surplus PS2 units were sold that month. As with every other system-seller on record (defining "system-seller" as a game that has an observable positive effect on sales), the vast majority of copies, even at launch, are sold to people who already own the system. Vice City pushed less surplus hardware than San Andreas did, and GTA3 even less than both of them.
The following generation, GTA4 had precisely zero noticeable effect on hardware sales in the U.S. despite selling 1.85M on the 360 and 1M on the PS3. Why this is is anybody's guess. GTA5 did have an effect, particularly on PS3, which was its flagship platform. PS3 sales grew from 71k in Aug. 2013 to 216k in September, an increase of 145k, and that's with September being a 5-week period. 360 sales grew from 96k to 169k, an increase half the size of what we saw on the PS3. To be fair, this was only two months out from the release of the PS4 & XBO, and in the aggregate system-sellers tend to have more muted impacts as a generation progresses due to the ever-shrinking number of late adopters. Also, it was split between two platforms, so if we combine the estimated surplus units sold for both the 360 and PS3, it shifted at least 217k extra units in the month of its release, which would make it the second-biggest system-seller in unit terms of any system ever in the U.S., behind only Destiny (yes, Destiny).
When GTA6 comes out we'll still be at least 18 to 30 months away from the release of the PS6 and Xbox 5 (assuming a 7- or 8-year life cycle), so it won't be as late as GTA5 was, so if it sets new sales records, I could see it moving more hardware than any other game in history, but again we're talking probably well under 500k surplus units combined across both PS5 & XBS in the U.S. Add in the rest of the world and at most it could move maybe around a million surplus hardware units next May.
EricHiggin said:
Typical inflation or overprinting money inflation? Things aren't so expensive now because of typical inflation. Which also means when things settle back down eventually, everything will become a bit cheaper again. Now it won't go back to being as cheap as 2020, due to typical inflation, but unless SNY wants to repeat the 3rd console curse again and tank PS6 sales, they'll put together the best console they can for $499 and will sell that. |
Increases in money supply do contribute to inflation, but they aren't the sole cause. Supply and demand dynamics are other contributors, and tariffs can have upwards pressure on prices. In any case, I doubt sticker prices in the aggregate are ever going back down, because they never go back down. When people say "We want prices to go down," what they're asking for is deflation, and we really, really don't want that. We run the risk of a deflationary spiral, which can be far more disastrous than a couple of years of higher-than-average inflation (see also the Great Depression). Even with the occasional bouts of deflation, in the long term the purchasing power of the dollar has always trended downward. There's a reason why you can buy cars for under $10k anymore, or a hamburger for 25 cents. There's a reason why $400 for a console was prohibitive 30 years ago but quite affordable today. There's a reason that $80 that Doc Brown owed Buford Tannen in 1885 was treated like a small fortune, because it was (over $2000 in today's money). None of that has nothing to do with something being "wrong" or "bad" in the economy. It's just a fact of life that a currency gets less valuable over time.
For video games specifically, I suppose it's possible that once all this trade war nonsense dies down console prices won't continue to increase, and we may see $80 games come down to $70, but I honestly doubt it. $70 and even $80 was a long time coming. Games weren't going to stay $60 forever, especially with ever increasing budgets.
Probably just a spambot. We get a ton of those, though other mods usually handle them.