That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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I can't find the numbers online but they probably could've given GTA5 away for free and made a profit.
They did give it away for free and make a profit
They did both, and it could fund the next 5 GTA games for 500 years and still turn a profit if they never took another cent. Whatever this "journalism" is, delete it, block it, and forget about it. They are the enemy.
They would have profited making GTA:O free to play, right from the get go.
People expect games that are ever more ambitious
Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn't have anything to do with ambition.
I would be perfectly happy with games on average being 30% shorter and 20% uglier if it meant a more sustainable industry. 1440p looks great. Raytracing is really nice and makes development easier. Let’s sit here until like 2035 just fine tuning and optimizing and getting cheaper hardware that can run it:
Nowadays games are very repetitive and grindy. That's very unfortunate as it kills the game. Very few of them have engaging side quests that don't feel like generic AI generated crap. So longer gameplay doesn't automatically equate to better quality games.
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Exactly. Look at Nintendo. A fun game doesn’t mean you have to have bleeding edge visuals.
Yes look at Nintendo, shitty visuals and high prices.
Makes profit or they’d stop doing it.
Their games have always been expensive , but they are but they've always been this side of reasonable. Let's see how $90 games treats everybody.
I wouldn't want to spend $90 on my kid, the little shit isn't worth it.
My son‘s birthday is coming up and I’ve been telling people for years to get us steam gift cards.
I think I realised what my big problem with $90 games is for Nintendo and it's this, when I was a kid I used to save up money and buy game boy games. It was an important thing my parents made me do because it meant that I learnt you don't just get given things for free (gifts are of course fine but at some point you need to learn about working to get money for things you want).
There's no way he's going to be able to get $90 in a reasonable time frame. What's he going to do, cut lawns for 2 years in a row?
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Dear internet person, this whole discussion is being triggered because Nintendo, of all people, decided $100 was an acceptable price for a video game. They are the asshats who opened the flood gates for the corporate zombies to waltz in.
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People praise expedition 33, that game might as well be an xbox 360 game and it people would still absolutely love it.
Absolutely no way Take-Two can afford anything less than $5B in profit every year. The stock market was a mistake.
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.
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.
Shit the hi fi rush team got laid off. Success doesn’t guarantee shit.
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They were probably on slightly profitable. Or, Money forbid, only breaking even.
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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.
Sorry, best we can do is microtransactions, fear of missing out and AI slop. That'll be $90.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s one fatal problem with this plan: Nintendo fans.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Go ahead. I’m back to piracy where needed and patient gaming where possible. These clowns played themselves. AAA games are unreasonable nowadays.
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.
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.
Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?
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