Alright, this is something that I’ve been wanting to talk about ever since I saw this pop up on my timeline a couple of days ago, and I’m sure you guys might have seen this as well, the whole rumor of people within the games industry wanting GTA 6 to cost $100 for the standard version, so that it sparks a chain reaction to that becoming the standard price for new games to compete with rising inflation and increased development costs.
The article we’re going to be looking at today is from Dexerto, but many other news outlets have covered this as well. Games industry hopes GTA 6 Cost $100 to justify gaming price hikes, says analyst. So this all stems from industry analyst Matthew Ball from a presentation called The State of Video Gaming in 2025, where he went over the struggle in the games industry to deal with inflation.
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So we have this graph here which shows how the prices of games have stayed nearly the same over the years, but the purchasing power of the dollar has gone down over the years, so obviously $60 now is not what $60 was 10 or 15 years ago for example.
So in that regard, technically games are cheaper now than they were back then because the prices have stayed roughly the same throughout all the inflation. So what he and many people within the games industry are hoping for is that GTA 6 is the start of a new price point for games, kind of like what it was, what was it some 2k game a few years ago that made all the games start to be $70 standard.
But a $10 jump from $60 to $70 is one thing, a $30 jump from $70 to $100 is just ridiculous, and that’s completely absurd. And I know budgets for games these days are just as outrageous, Concord was a 400 million-dollar budget and it just all went down the drain because no one wanted it and the game is now shut down.
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GTA 6 is rumored to be in the realm of $2 billion in dev costs. Inflation has of course caused costs to increase on the production side of games as well because they have to pay all their workers to make those games.
However, what this graph fails to take into account is the concept that I like to call inflation. You see, back in the day when games were $60, they didn’t have tons and tons of microtransactions that were also sold in the in-game store. Even 10 years ago, you could buy little cosmetics for a few bucks here and there.
Remember Black Ops 2 when it had those DLC camos that were like $1.99 each and you got a camo that you could use for every single gun? Well now you pay $70 and you have to go and pay another $20 for just one in-game skin with a blueprint for a single weapon and you have a $10 battle pass and so on.
Games make a lot more money these days off of their microtransactions even more so than they do on the game sales themselves. So that more than makes up the initial cost of the game up front being a bit undervalued for today’s rate of inflation.
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There is no need for games to be priced that high for a standard edition. Now for GTA 6’s case, I’m assuming there will be better editions like a collector’s edition and maybe a middle edition for $100 or something like that and maybe they do early access or something or a bundle with GTA Plus.
They’re of course going to do something like that, no doubt. But the standard edition I think is still just going to be the $70 rate. Now would people buy GTA 6 if the standard price was $100? Yes, they would.
They would of course buy it at that price. But I think that would only be the case with GTA 6 because it’s a game that is bigger than almost any entertainment media at this point. The hype for GTA 6 is unmatched, it is insane. But going back to the economy and inflation, the inflation isn’t just hitting these companies, the consumers are also getting shafted by increased prices without wages to match.
So if you make games cost $100, well the consumers are just going to get even more choosy on what they spend their money on in the games industry. So ultimately it’s just going to lead to fewer people buying games in general because they just can’t afford it.
So they’ll just pick maybe one game and focus on that, while other games that come out just don’t get bought at all. Not to mention a lot of games these days, in my opinion, aren’t even worth the $70. I’m looking at you Ubisoft, so you think people would happily pay $100 for the same slop they’ve been shelling out? No, hell no. And there’s a reason why they want GTA 6 to be the guinea pig it would be one of the only games warranting a price tag that high.
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If any other game tries to introduce that $100 standard edition price tag, they would get instantly laughed at. And really, Rockstar probably would get a ton of backlash if they tried to introduce that price tag too, even with it being a GTA game. So yeah, I think games will continue to be $70.
If anything, I could maybe see them being $80 eventually, another $10 price increase. But when you increase the introductory costs, you ultimately lead fewer people into potentially buying microtransactions for the game. So that’s probably something they want to avoid. Because at the end of the day, the more people you have on your game, the more people you can show off those microtransactions to and maybe tempt you to spend further money.
But I just wanted to give my thoughts on this after seeing it pop up a couple of days ago. Let me know your thoughts on it in the comments. Do you think games should be $100 or do you think they are just fine at $70? And would you even buy a game if it was $100 for the standard edition?