Guillotine please.

GTA is THE ONLY GAME that can manage to sell at $80 lol

It’s a fine line to tread. £70 feels a tipping point for many. So sure you may get some that pay £80 but how many will wait for a sale?

Especially when it’s £70 day 1 and often it isn’t feature complete and quite often buggy. You no longer get the best experience. You can wait 6month get some updates and a cheaper product.

A tone deft take is a tone deft take...

I think it's cute these soulless corpos are convinced people who are willing to pay $80 for GTA VI would be willing to pay that price for almost anything else.

I think it was Michael Jackson who sang “ All I wanna say is that they don't really care about us “

Sorry, bank of America, I'll pay no more than 0 dollars for GTA6.

I don't understand how GTA6 would set the new price at $80? If companies don't give you a game on the level of GTA6, then no one is going to pay $80 for your game. So I hope your game is a 10 year, billion dollar game if you think that just because GTA6 can command $80 or more, that yours could too...

I never knew I needed a ski mask and a bag with a dollar sign on it until I read this Bank of America quote.

Man, shut up rich bank higher ups lmao.

Leave it to a bank to have the worst take of the year in the gaming sphere.

There is no possibility of exceeding $70 because make money through in-app purchase.

Devs/publishers can charge £80, but it will be up to the game itself to justify it's worth.

Personally, I would be happy to pay £80 for a fantastic game that looks amazing, and has flawless performance.

My real issue comes from poorly made / optimised games releasing under the 'release broken, and maybe fix later' banner, we see so often. In the same way I would not pay literally anything for GTA6 if its not 60fps.

£70 is probably my limit

That said I don't think I've ever actually paid that for a game.

I can't speak for the entire world but in the UK the likes of Smyth's and Currys very often give a slight discount when you pre order the game.

The RRP maybe £70 but £62 - £64.99 is probably more realistic

Unless of course you buy it digitally in which case there will be no discounts (certainly not day 1 anyway)

What's this got to do with a bank?

Well it's that or a Nintendo mobile looking game for the same price.

The industry needs a revamp or a crash.

Bet he’s never played a game in his life. So tired of this screw everyone but the rich attitude corporations have.

It's pretty cowardly to hide behind GTA.

Personally I'm not even sure I'll be getting GTAVI, I've started GTAV many times and never finished it and I have no interest in the multiplayer component.

If the game runs at 60fps 4k in some performance mode on a base PS5 I may pick it, but knowing that this type of game doesn't hold my attention the whole way any more it'd be difficult to even pry £70 from my wallet.

I hope GTA is not sold at more than $70 US.

If it is, I will move it from my “Must Buy” to “Wait for a Sale” category. And that would be sad for me.

BoA has not place commenting on video games. Seriously, these Mammon worshippers are out of control.

@themightyant You're correct that it's true that they've gotten cheaper, but they have far less overheads given that it's a mainly digitial market and the number of gamers has increased many fold.

Is every higher-up in America just a greedy c***?

The article has numbers in US dollars. A £69.99 game in the UK is already way over that $80 when you convert it.

@MickOnYourFace

“Is every higher-up in America just a greedy c***?”

In my best Kliff impersonation:

Yes

@themightyant I don't disagree with any of that.

I'd personally like them to bring their development costs down, make smaller games and spread the risk out a bit. It's insane how long the credits are on major releases.

I'm not someone who's particularly convinced of the value of marketing, it often appears to me a bit of a black hole, certainly for established brands/series, I imagine the amount they'll spend on GTA marketing will be immense, when really everyone and their gran will know when it's out.

@Starkei UK prices are VAT inclusive. US prices do not include sales tax since it varies by municipality (city, county, and state set sales tax). The $69.99 game is actually $76.81 in my town. Still, £70 is like $95. You guys are getting screwed.

That’s one way to rescue the American economy 😂

@IntrepidWombat oh yes we get taxed out the arse until dead then taxed again for good measure. Nice weather though.

Used to work for bank of America extreme crappy company.

They are out of their minds, $70 is already a lot for a single game. With many good games releasing per month they want to make us bankrupt.

No stress, it will be $89 (or $119 for the Digital Deluxe Edition, with 14 days of „early access“).

Don't quite get how a bank, a completely separate business entity, has such a strong stake in what Rockstar does.

@themightyant yea gaming is arguably cheaper than ever. Launch price is cheaper and you can do physical and digital sales or subscriptions. We are at a point where there is way more content for less price, but that is not good enough.

Cost of living is higher which I guess is the counter argument. Not devs fault though, there expenses are also much higher.

That sounds like a great deal. Spend more money so that we can continue to spend more money? Revolutionary. Let's get right on that.

Paying £80 for gta 6 would be acceptable but that doesn’t mean I’d pay it for any other game!

I think 50 quid'll be about right and I can wait for that price point. I've given up on day one releasing. Most of my PS5 gaming has come from either PS4 or psplus.

I know the kids will buy it at whatever. But I'm not one anymore.

Take-Two is a publicly traded company so aren't they obligated to maximize potential profits with every business decision they make (Or they can be sued by shareholders for not maximizing profits)? Of course it could be argued that a cheaper price point will bring in more money down the road with in-game transactions...

Bankers gonna' bank.

Where is Johnny Silverhand when you need him?

Payment processors should never dictate the price of the world. Keep monopolies out of gaming

Besides $80 MKW there are at least 4 other Switch 2 games that cost $80.

Super Mario Wonder
Mario Party Jamboree
Kirby Forgotten Lands
Zelda TotK

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/nintendo-switch-2-games/#corePlatforms=Nintendo+Switch+2&f=corePlatforms&sort=pd&p=0

Sure, they include some stuff not found in the Switch versions of the games, but if the game is $80 and you can't buy it any cheaper than $80 then it's still $80.

And Donkey Kong Bananza was a $70 game a/ a $20 dlc about a month later. All of the seasonal activities in the game since then have been dlc dependent .

I still haven't played GTAV so I don't care how they price it but the $80 cat is out of the bag. 🤑

@DogPark No, they're not. It’s Reddit, but: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15iy8ra/eli5_what_people_mean_by_saying_a_company_is/

Inflation is real. I hate BoA for other reasons (they briefly held my mortgage, and had no way to pay online without incurring a fee, garbage bank I will never voluntarily do business with), but...I think they have a point here.

$60 in 2020 is the same as $74.64 in 2025 (source: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator) - so charging $70 in 2026 is charging less in real money than charging $60 in 2020.

$80 in 2025 dollars (not even 2026) is more like $64.32 in 2020 dollars - that's not much of an increase at all, honestly.

$60 in 2014, when GTAV originally released, is the same as $81.60 in 2025 - so by that measurement, $80 isn't even an increase.

GTA VI could probably get away with the higher price, but just because Rockstar charges it doesn’t mean I will buy other games at that price.

There are very few games where I'd be willing paying that much. GTA VI might be one of them, but even then I'd consider waiting for a sale.

It's ridiculous to even consider paying this much for a standard edition of a game. Unfortunately, hardcore GTA fans (of which I am not one) will pay it, to avoid FOMO.

Only $80? They could get away with even more for the kind of people who play it

Man, if I was Take-Two I would sell this game at $50 just out of spite.

@Nexozi A lot. Games are primarily a digital marketplace now and a lot of it will go back to the bank in a traceable way. After all, a lot of people who might be inclined to float physical cash around other places will probably want this particular game and then the bank gets a nice big chunk of it.

If the rest of life wasn't squeezing so many people financially 80 bucks would seem like a more natural progression. Publishers have also lost the plot. They choose to spend 100-500 million and allow feature creep. I dont need to see every hair follicle and have the mechanics of Skyrim, AC and Final Fantasy crammed into every new open world release. The people that green light the project no longer are people who play games or understand gamers collectively. They all chasing fortnite, apparently not realizing that its the 40 year old gamer parent keeping those games afloat by buying stuff for their kids. The spenders of the games they play AND dont play are all but one generation. 30-45 lol

The guillotine was a fantastic invention.

2 dollars max.

What a shower of absolute c##ts!

In the meantime, Saros already sells for €79.99, or $93.5 usd.

They should charge 60 and undercut the industry. That would be sick. Like Silksong! That was such a baller move of demanding space on the market.

Bruh this guy is out of his mind and ps as an American bank of America does really suck 😒

“People aren’t angry enough at rising costs literally everywhere else in their lives, why don’t we exploit these troubled times for additional profit as well?”

This infuriating phenomenon is obviously not exclusive to video games. The powder keg of rage that these folks continue to pour gasoline over is flirting with absolute disaster.

If you need someone else to charge $80 first to justify charging $80 for your game, you probably shouldn’t charge $80 for your game.

people here are greatly underestimating FOMO and what some gamers are willing to spend on entertainment. many games could get away with the $80 price tag for a particular demographic. why? because once it is standardized, if you want to be there day 1, you will have no other choice. if you are THAT type of person and lack will power, you will gladly pay the premium just to be part of the conversation. i would guess that at least 25% of potential customers for high profile games would pay $80 without flinching and that is more than enough for the publisher to earn most of its budget back.

keep in mind that in canada, games have been over $100 (with tax for a while now). i.e. donkey kong bananza is CAD$113; resident evil requiem on ps5 is CAD$102; several switch 2 re-releases are priced at CAD$130!!! they are selling just fine. so... yea, expect the price hike to hit by the time the ps6 releases... the US is a spoiled marketplace that has yet to feel the pinch due to the rigged american dollar, but the rest of the world had already been paying absurd prices for software for the past 5 years if not longer.

Of course they are investors! Jess...

These guys can go forth and multiply with themselves.

@themightyant That's a fair point, but I think it only tells half the story. The per-unit price argument assumes a roughly static audience, and the audience has done anything but stay static.

• 1985 - The US home console market had effectively collapsed post the 1983 crash, bottoming out at around $100M in revenue. The NES was rebuilding from near zero.
• 1990 - Global gaming market ~$5–7B, estimated 100–200M players worldwide, mostly US/Japan/Western Europe
• 2000 - ~$20–25B market, ~300–400M players. PS2 launches and becomes the best-selling console ever at 158M units
• 2013 - ~$70B market, ~1.2B players. Mobile has started pulling in people who'd never owned a console
• 2020 - ~$177B market, 2.69B players. Mobile alone accounts for nearly half of all revenue

So yes, a $60 PS4 game in 2013 is only ~$85 in today's money. But the publisher in 2013 was selling into a market roughly 10–15x larger by player count than the one their NES-era counterparts faced, and one that was generating 10x+ the total revenue. A blockbuster in 1990 sold a few million copies. A blockbuster in 2013 sold tens of millions, plus whatever came after from DLC.

The per-unit price being below inflation is real, but the addressable market growing 15–30x over the same period is also real. Most industries would kill for that kind of audience expansion to offset margin pressure.

The thing is GTA could absolutely go up to £80 and will still sell eye watering amounts because it's GTA. Other companies need to realise they're not in the same league and trying to copy them would only end badly. We've seen with games that offer good experiences at a reasonable price point such as space marine 2 or expedition 33 have done fantastically well. Would they have done so well priced at £80...absolutely not.

@themightyant Fair enough, restricting it to console does change things. Revised numbers:

• 1985 - Console market was essentially rubble post the 1983 crash, ~$100M in the US before the NES started rebuilding it
• 1990 - Global console market ~$5B, ~150–200M players, concentrated in US/Japan/Western Europe
• 2000 - ~$15–20B. PS2 launches and becomes the best-selling console ever at 158M units
• 2013 - ~$25–30B, ~300–400M console players
• 2020 - Console software alone was ~$40–45B globally, player count somewhere in the 300–400M range still

So the console market has grown maybe 3–5x in revenue since the SNES era, with player count closer to your 1.5–2x estimate. The DLC and live service revenue on top of box price means the effective spend per player per title is higher than the sticker price suggests, but that mostly flows to platform holders and the bigger publishers rather than mid-tier studios.

So on the console-specific argument, largely conceded. The audience expansion point holds for gaming as an industry, but you picked the right battleground.

On GTA 6 specifically though, that franchise is basically its own counter-argument. GTA 5 has shipped 225 million copies and generated nearly $10 billion in revenue since 2013, still selling over a million copies a month more than a decade later, at $60. GTA 6 is projected to earn $3.2 billion in its first year alone, including $1 billion in pre-orders, before GTA Online even gets going. At $50 a unit that's still a generational return. Rockstar can afford to price aggressively because the volume and the long tail are guaranteed. The problem is that no amount of charging $80 at launch fixes anything for the studios that aren't Rockstar.

(Data is my day job, so I love this kind of chitchat. )

@themightyant The dev cost point is well supported by the data. Budgets grew from under $1 million in the early 1990s to over $12 million by 2005, a 22x increase adjusted for inflation, and that was before the really steep part of the curve. A modern AAA title greenlit for 2024-25 typically costs $200 million or more, compared to $50-150 million just five years ago. So your 10x-100x range is accurate, and if you compare the very top end to the early 90s baseline it's closer to 1000x. The revenue growing 3-5x while costs grew 10-100x is just a fundamentally broken ratio regardless of anything else going on.

The indie and mid-tier examples are interesting though, because they suggest the audience for non-live-service, non-open-world games very much still exists. Stardew Valley has sold over 41 million copies, developed almost entirely by one person. Balatro hit 5 million sales within its first year, also a solo developer. Clair Obscur is the most striking case: 33-person team, budget under $10 million, 5 million copies sold by October 2025 and over 8 million by its one-year anniversary. For context, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War had a budget of $700 million. You could make 70 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33s for the price of one Call of Duty.

On mobile: Stardew and Balatro translate well because they're pick-up-and-play by nature, but that's not most console games. A 60-hour narrative RPG or a game built around a controller and a TV isn't really a mobile experience, it's a different thing entirely. Forcing everything onto mobile to chase Gen Z would risk diluting the very thing that makes console games worth playing. The generational split is real but I'm not sure the answer is convergence, it might just be that different platforms serve genuinely different audiences and that's fine.

The honest conclusion is probably what you said: it's a tough nut. Larian succeeded partly because they're large enough to make AAA games but not subject to the mechanics mandated by publicly traded publishers. That's a very specific structural condition that most studios can't replicate. Risk aversion at $200 million budgets isn't a creative failing, it's basic maths. FIFA and Call of Duty exist because at that cost level, weird bets are genuinely dangerous rather than just unfashionable.

( #DataNerd )

To me, NO game is worthg $70, let alone paying more. I don't care how much money they spent, how long they took making it etc, I care about the 'VALUE' to me. I don't care if they spent 5yrs on the Graphics, making it look ultra-realistic, the Game-play loop and Story are unlikely to be ground-breaking, a massive evolution or jump up on what games have offered for years.

The reason that games seem to be taken longer and longer is purely graphics - the increase in resolution, increase in detail, increase in polygons and object counts etc - but game-play hasn't really evolved. At best, you now get more games at 60fps, but the Game-play mechanics, game-play loops etc haven't really evolved. GTA 6 will likely have GTA mechanics first introduced in GTA 3 and refined over 4 and 5, follow a very similar Game-play loop but just look more modern, more 'impressive' graphically.

I can buy 'massive' games offering hundreds of hours of hours of game-play for a LOT less than $70 - especially if I wait a few months or so for sales. I don't need to play ANY game Day 1 and refuse to pay $70 for ANY game. I can play my Backlog, play Free games (F2P or Free in a Sub Service - even required Sub services like PS+ Essential offer 'free' games) or buy games on sale, games now less than $/£20 that are patched/complete.

Counterpoint; no game needs to go up to $80, and $70 is already an overreach for most games.

This notion that games must increase in price because publishers, developers and now friggin banks want them to is nonsense.

Scope, budget and plan your games to be made, published and sold at $60. I can't think of a single AAA-game I've played in the last 15 years that couldn't have been made cheaper by trimming some of the obvious fat.

I'll concede that GTA has a lot of cultural cache, and I won't be surprised if Rockstar decides to test the waters. But thankfully, GTA hasn't been a must-buy-franchise for me since the original Vice City came out. I'll happily wait until GTA6 is on sale for $40.

Nothing worse than big wig CEOs

@Bot_Bot_69 - not defending corporations but saying they have far less overhead is 100% false.

Game budgets have blown up. Teams are massive compared to teams making SNES games. Everything other than selling digitally is so much more expensive than it’s ever been.

Inflation sucks. Corporations suck.

But on the flip side - you can’t be angry and up in arms about the layoffs in the industry and then turn around and demand that the price of games stays stagnant forever.

Those of you who hate the live service push, loot boxes, paid DLC. Those are forced into games to produce profits - the price of games has stayed relatively stagnant but the cost to develop hasn’t.

I hate the never ending push for profit but it’s the unfortunate reality we live in and refusing to pay more is going to cause more of the problems everyone complains about.

Not a great take. I'm Canadian, so AAA games are already over $100 for me. I think I've only ever purchased one game on release at that price (RE Requiem at $101.49, standard edition). I used to get a new release every month, now it's every two years or so. I'm a massive Final Fantasy fan and I just bought part 2 of the remake a few days ago when it went to $25. That being said, I've grabbed some games day 1 that have a lower price point, like Fatal Frame II (65 before taxes).

Games are super expensive to make, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to drop nearly $120 for a Digimon game. Isn't it more efficient to have a price regular people can afford and sell more copies? I know I just wait for price drops/sales now, and I'm sure plenty of people do too.

I'm still not going to pay more than 50 pounds for a game.

@Ajbr8687 You've removed my point from it's context and ignored the acknowledgement of them costing more to make.

@Bot_Bot_69 I don’t see how that’s the case at all. I was replying to one of your comments which said “they have far less overhead due to the digital market”

That’s just not a true statement. At all.

Your comments after the fact acknowledge what you’re saying now but I didn’t see those when I replied originally. I agree with you that they should be spending less money on mega releases and make great projects with less people…but that will result in mass layoffs which a lot of people will struggle with.

@Ajbr8687 I hate arguing semantics, but I didn't say they had less overhead (as in total) I said overheads (alluding to the reduction of the physical market and the many costs associated with it), so my claim wasn't 100% false, you misread it. Anyway... I'm already over 2 weeks late replying, let's nip this one in the bud or we'll be going round in circles for many more months. Have a goodun!