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

That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.

People expect games that are ever more ambitious

Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn't have anything to do with ambition.

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.

Absolutely no way Take-Two can afford anything less than $5B in profit every year. The stock market was a mistake.

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.

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.

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.

GTA 6 is just going to be client app to a universe of micro transactions. They should probably just give it away free.

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.

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!

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.

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.

According to SEC filings, Take Two Interactive studio made 2.241 Billion USD profit in 2024.

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.

Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?

And it's an impossible equation for most Americans to pay more. Especially if things continue to downward spiral.

Where's my eye patch?

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.

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.

Go ahead. I’m back to piracy where needed and patient gaming where possible. These clowns played themselves. AAA games are unreasonable nowadays.

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

Yet again proves that capitalism is a cancer, and they’ll never be happy with anything, except for endless exponential growth

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.

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.

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.

Every games is free if you know where to look

How about buying only one or two dolls for their kids?

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.