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Larian head of publishing Michael Douse warned that game companies are saying the quiet part out loud after industry analyst Michael Ball wrote that some of them are hoping Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch with a price of at least $80, and possibly as high as $100.
The remark came in Ball’s “State of Videogaming in 2025” report, which lists Grand Theft Auto 6 as one of several “potential new ‘growth engines’,” alongside things like user-generated content, the release of the Switch 2, and the growth of “non-core” markets.
“In 2025, GTA 6’s impact on industry playtime and spend will be mixed as it launches console-only and (severely) cannibalizes hours/spend on other titles,” Ball wrote. “But some gamemakers hope GTA 6 will be priced at $80—$100, breaking the $70 barrier and helping $50 titles to move up to $60, $60 to $70, $70 to $80, etc.”
Ball said games “have never been lower in real terms than they are today,” which he described as “a tough problem to start and worsened by stalled player growth and rising costs” of development.
“No other major leisure forms have seen their products become worth less nearly every single year for decades—and this hurts developers of every size and budget,” he wrote. “In real terms, a $70 GTA 6 would be the cheapest-ever GTA—30% less than its original 2D entries, and 16-24% less than GTA 4 and GTA 5.”
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“You’re not supposed to say this out loud!!!!” Douse wrote on X (via GamesRadar) in response to a VGC story about Ball’s report.
“A good company raises salaries in line with inflation so that their staff don’t die or something, but games prices haven’t risen with inflation,” he continued. “This isn’t the reason the industry is in the shit for now, but it is an uncomfortable truth. On the other hand, the responsibility for a game developer is to make sure that the game they show lives up to that promise, and that investment from the player.”
It is, as Ball said, a tough nut to crack. Development costs of big-budget games have skyrocketed, while purchase prices have remained relatively stable—and on the PC side of things in particular, Steam sales and Epic freebies have conditioned us to expect our games to be cheap. That makes nudging across-the-board prices higher a tricky proposition, as publishers run the risk of putting off buyers who are content to wait for a sale rather than pouncing on a new game on launch day.
Which isn’t to say it’s an insurmountable problem—Activision turned the dial a little bit in 2022 with Modern Warfare 2, and if there’s any upcoming game that’s going to be able to get away with another meaningful price hike, it’s Grand Theft Auto 6—but it will undoubtedly be a topic of much controversy and grousing when it happens.
Also a question is whether an $80 (or $100) GTA 6 would actually have that sort of across-the-board impact on industry-wide pricing, a point Douse touched on in reply to users who pointed out that people might be willing to shell out that kind of cash for a new Grand Theft Auto, but not much else.
“We are at a strange moment where retail is not defining output and content, but now nobody is,” Douse wrote. “There’s no standard. It’s difficult to parse. It’s ’the wild west’. The point is that perhaps Rockstar have enough clout to lay down the new law. And with that others will sink or swim?”
There’s already a lot of sinking going on in the videogame industry, as witnessed in the layoffs and closures that have plagued studios over the past two years and counting, and increasing the price point of new games at launch isn’t going to address that on its own. But whether it’s GTA 6, The Elder Scrolls 6, or whatever it is that Larian is cooking up next, it is going to happen eventually—and as much as it sucks to pay more, as someone who remembers forking over $60 for System Shock 2 in 1999 (Canadian, yes, but the point holds), I don’t think it’ll be entirely unjustified.
Grand Theft Auto 6, for the record, still hasn’t been announced for PC—as Ball wrote, I fully expect it will be a console-only release when it comes out, and we’ll get ours later.
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Kurt Indovina
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