Baldur’s Gate 3 publishing director thinks GTA 6 might have the “clout” to normalise a $100 price tag

Debate continues to rage on the internetworks about whether premium video games, and especially the ones with the largest budgets, need to have higher price tags. This time, the culprit is Matthew Ball of analyst firm Epyllion, who remarks in a sprawling State Of Videogaming 2025 report that “some gamemakers hope GTA 6 will be priced at $80-$100 [in the USA], breaking the $70 barrier and helping $50 titles to move up to $60, $60 to $70, $70 to $80, etc.”

Picked up by VGC, these comments have now been circulated on social media, and have attracted the extremely polarised mixture of responses you’re probably expecting. Among those chipping in is Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse, who makes the familiar argument that overall prices for games like GTA aren’t necessarily higher today when you factor in economic inflation, while also acknowledging that up-front price alone doesn’t explain the industry’s recent mass livelihood devastation, and that few people would happily pay that much for a video game – not even Our Lord In Open Worlding GTA.

Having quote-tweeted the VGC article with the caption “You’re not supposed to say this out loud!!!!”, Douse added that “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.

“This isn’t the reason the industry is in the shit for now, but it is an uncomfortable truth,” he went on. “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.”

Another user objected that while GTA 6 might get away with such a hike, that’s unlikely to be true of most games. “That is indeed the problem,” Douse replied, adding that digital distribution has long since done away with the checks on game availability imposed by brick-and-mortar retailers. “We are at a strange moment where retail is not defining output & content, but now nobody is,” he went on. “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?”

Douse offered similar arguments last August in response to the pricing of Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, commenting of a potential broad price increase that “everyone’s just waiting for GTA6 to do it lol.”

I bundled together a few thoughts of my own in that last article, which I will now summarise: yes, the cost/price ratio for games of GTA’s scale doesn’t seem healthy, but the people who benefit from price increases aren’t necessarily the company’s developers (let alone outsourcing teams in places with fewer labour protections), because a lot of the moolah naturally goes to investors.

Raising the upfront price could mean that publishers don’t have to resort to other ways of monetising games, such as insidious or outright predatory microtransactions, but as Douse concedes, it’s unlikely publishers of $100 games would piously scale back on their monetisation, because publishers will always want to make more money. Whatever it costs to begin with, GTA 6 will doubtless launch alongside a new incarnation of GTA Online, with all the seasonal DLC elements you’d expect.

Wash that down with the tepid armchair anti-capitalist observation that the publishers of “triple-A” games have long since locked themselves into an understanding of their art that requires them to defy gravity. The fixtures and flourishes must always be shinier, more lustrous, more lifelike; the space must always be larger and richer with shows of technological investment; the numbers must always go up. The industry’s commitment to generative AI, aka fancy automation software, is one of many efforts to get around the problem that you can only employ so many people to create productions of this scale, assuming it isn’t an active attempt to butcher the workforce.

I suspect that quite a lot of developers, even those who are relatively senior at companies like Take-Two, would love to get away from this thinking, but the most vocal, if not largest portion of their audience now insist upon it, having been taught to think this way by years of marketing (and by years of video game press like myself broadly acceding to marketing’s cultural priorities). Sometimes I think that the only way out of the jam is some kind of full-on industry collapse that performs a broad reset, though the more constructive option is perhaps to stop thinking in terms of “industries” full stop.