They want GTA VI to cost $100
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- Опубликовано: 10 фев 2025
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In a recent presentation from Michael Ball, it was mentioned that game developers are hoping that GTA VI releases with an MSRP higher than games have released in the past to set a new precedent. Linus and Luke discuss.
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The amount of money they make on microtransactions more than makes up for whatever "loss" they have from selling it cheaper.
This, Rockstar made billions of $$$ from shark cards.
The amount they make from a far larger buying base should already be enough. More people buy games now.
@@alexmartin6561 Unfortunately we're also in a world where games like assassin's creed and GTA take teams of hundreds instead of dozens...
Yeah. That's why so many games have microtransactions in the first place atm.
GTA VI will be a big money maker no matter what it's priced at, but the real question is how other games will survive at current price points with development costs only going up
They'll just do what all shit AAA game studios do already. Charge a high entrance price and then have horrible microtransactions too. Why choose if you can have both and gamers are stupid enough to pay
Everyone likes to talk about the inflation calculations which does not paint the whole picture. No one talks about wages being flat for last 20 years and our money having less buying power. According to inflation calculator $10 in 1980 is equal to $60 today. The dollar in the past went much further than it does today for everything. Here's an example $10 in 1980 would get you 28 comic books, $60 today will get you like 15 comic books.
remember inflation can only be measured by comparing goods
I think one of the main problems with todays AAA gaming industry is the near deletion of low to medium budget games from big studios.
I truly believe that some of the more recent flops wouldn’t have made their money back regardless of quality. Forget “too big to fail”, some of these games are getting too big to succeed
Wages are up over the last week years... you just have to look up on FRED... or is that too hard? No reason to spread misinformation.
There is a 0% chance they would remove micro-transactions if they increased the price of video games to $100. Absolutely no chance, corporate greed is too integrated into their culture.
They got a taste of Micro transactions and will never give that up.
@csjpokey It's just so yummy.
I think that, with the amount of monthly revenue the biggest players make, we’re way past corporate greed - it’s something bigger.
Microtransactions are like fentanyl to corporations.
I can't stand how blatantly brainwashed you all are into this narrative.
Offering something that has no real effect on anyone for money is not bad.
There is literally nothing wrong with fortnite skins or any games version.
People pay more for aesthetic variants all the time, like I did with my CPU cooler the other day.
Yeah that graph at 00:54 is super helpful when there’s a Secret Labs Banner completely covering the x axis making the entire chart unreadable
For real dude
You'll life
Then google it yourself kiddo
I get Secret Lab is a sponsor of the wan show but if they could dial it back to like 80-90% opacity all the time that would be fantastic.
It covered up so much stuff now it makes it hard to watch.
@@happinessiskey2858 not how a sponsorship works buddy. they pay to be on your screen. why would they pay for low opacity..........
The games I get the most dedicated to all cost under $20.
Real
I think my only exception is monster hunter. I've put a minimum of 200 hours on each instalment and wilds should easily get me to 600 hours like world did. Can't think of another series that does the same for me personally.
I purchased 7 days to die for 15 bucks somewhere around alpha 6... I have over 1600 hours into that game.
A good game doesn't need fancy graphics,,, it needs fun concepts and good gameplay... that's it.
You could give me a square pew pewing triangles and if it had a cool concept and fun gameplay... I'd play it.
But... but BeamNG!! ($25) And Minecraft!! ($30 [on PC anyway])
@SR74GamesI might be crazy but i think i bought minecraft for 10$ when it was in alpha. Definitely bought a 15$ version for a friend at the time
They seem to forget that games used to come on expensive cartridges. Then they moved to cheaper discs and gave us zero discount. Now we get nothing physically and are told we don't own what we buy...
We used to be able to sell our games when we finished them. So... games actually cost us way more now. And have way more glitches
I would add that a $100 game without microtransactions also needs to have a COMPLETE game, not a half finished one, then sell you DLC under the guise it's new, when it's just the other half of the game that should have already been there.
Excuse me, what are microtransactions?
@@JazzyJeff.a scam
@ Agreed, a scam, but they are the small in game purchases for like a new skin or weapon or in game currency, etc.
@@JazzyJeff. in game purchases like weapons and cosmetics. They'll argue that it's just cosmetics that doesn't impact gameplay but the idea is to get kids addicted to it so they'll spend more money on cosmetics than the actual price of the game itself. It's a scam and unfortunately some gamers are naive enough to support it
@@ejtaylor73 It doesn't matter what they are. The cost to develop those items were part of the development costs which means it's in the retail price you pay for the game. No one should be paying for those unless it's an expansion developed separately with a different budget.
“Game prices have never been lower” is extremely misleading
Acording to them because,THEY ARE FUCKING MILLIONAIRE PEOPLE DUHH haha,with that of course it seems kinda low but to us THEIR FANS is not,jesus is not even today,i remember old times when ps3 games were like,in our country of course like 3000$ pesos from argentina,now you search one ps3 game and it´s like 30.000$ pesos!!!!!??? and im pretty sure in usa it´s kinda the same thing.
@@helltioeverygamesremember when you had the choice to not vote for Milei? lol now you're crying
@@sorsun46 With Milei prices actually got a lot lower. He removed many taxes that had been inflating video game prices in argentina for years
I would pay 100 if all dlc were included and no sharkcards were ever sold
But there is no way they won't sell MTX or cards, they make a lot more from MTX than they would from small price increase.
Sharkcards made them billions.
We should not even touch this point, cause they just gonna increase the price and still have MTX.
Online DLC will probably be free but they will sell the shark cards.
Story DLC will probably be paid if released.
who are u lying to? it's gta6 u will pay anyway
shark cards is only for online and they never forced you to buy that.
I'm fine with paying 100 as long as I have fun for over a thousand hours. If the game isn't the best one on the market for me personally then I'm going to be annoyed about the base price being over 70$
30 million copies in the first 30 days. At $60 each, that’s $1.8 billion… BILLION!! No, game prices do not need to increase.
Imagine the first full year of copies sold.
u do have to account for the 30% cut of the stores and taxs and the cost to make gta 6 and the upkeep such as devs making more content and servers even though its p2p it still will need servers for saving some stuff and matchmaking
2:20 "This is ten percent markup,
Twenty percent shill,
Fifteen percent concentrated power of hell,
Five percent hatred,
Fifty percent pain,
And a hundred percent reason to wait for a sale"
Hell yeah, great gym song
hahaha, that's gold :D
Numbers exist you know
@@citadel9428 Bro did not get the joke
@DeevoC Aaah yes. Fort Minor. Classics :) You have good taste sir :D
1:25- Can you not cover important graph axis labels with ads? Thanks.
Cry about it😂😂😂yall are so soft bro its hilarious
@@Bronisbetter they arent soft, some people are trying to read parts of the graphs that are being shown and we cant read all of it because of the ad on screen and it is annoying
@@Bronisbetter low tier rage b8 do better
real wages haven't increased enough. people dont care about inflation they care about how much of their budget it eats up. if you make min wage when gta v came out and you still make that gta vi will be more expensive for you.
Exactly. how is inflation affecting their budget when they havnt increased salaries for their workers?
These companies do not deal in physical goods their main expense is paying people not acquiring materials that may change in price over time.
If inflation is affecting their budget it’s because they are making bad business decisions not because they are paying more for labor.
Exactly, where's the graph of minimum wage over inflation? Or even just a flat minimum wage, it's flatter than videogame prices in the US.
If you’ve been making minimum wage for 10 years you need to make some big changes in your life and probably shouldn’t be worrying about how much video games cost
@ That's not the point. All wages are related to the min wage. No increase on the min wage means barely any increase to wages overall. It's not about a single person, it's about the whole market trend.
@@Kleyguerth And the graph of more and more people buying more and more games over time? Lots of relevant data missing.
12 million people: NO WAY I AM PAYING 100 DOLLARS!
Exclusive gold gun cosmetic pack at preorder
11 million people: PREORDER!!!!
Most good games now a days don't even come out of AAA studios. Most of the amazing games i've played in the last year came from indie devs, who already sell their games below $60. Usually for either $40 or $20, sometimes less.
Yeah, I bought Space Marine 2, but besides that, most of my games have been under $40, like Helldivers 2, DRG, Satisfactory, PEO2, R6S, and Stellaris. Wouldn't mind paying even $200 for GTA VI though if it's anything like we're expecting it to be. Some games are just WAY better than others. Compared to something like Anthem, Fallout 76, and Starfield, I'll gladly give $200 to Rockstar for GTA VI.
@@zoopa9988 And in my opinion for SpaceMarine its worth it since it doesnt feel like a cheap cashgrab. Only thing i dont like is that we "just" had 6 PVE Missions at the start and the balancing with some classes is still a bit meh here and there
Its because AAA got used to smelling their own farts too much, decided to go political because they thought they knew best and fell apart.
The smaller studios just make games.
rockstar isn't like most AAA studios
As consumers, we should just stop buying overpriced goods, but we know that won't happen.
Overpriced goods don't sell (at least not stuff like video games)
How could a game costing $100 for hundreds of hours of playtime be considered "overpriced"?
@ it isnt, and overpriced is subjective term so using it in such generic way is pointless
I'm not even buying 70€ games, never ever in my life will i pay 100€. Not because i can't afford to but because it's simply too much money.
exactly! with how few games I actually buy in a year, shelling out $100 for game wouldn't break my bank. However, there's simply so much other stuff you could buy with that kind of money. Also, I'm surely not gonna spend it on a newly released game. If anything, I'll wait a year or two until all the bugs are fixed to then buy it on sale
You will
i never bought singleplayer games, just pirated. and multiplayer games many are free these days . i spend money on real life stuff
Did you used to own a snes, genesis or ps1? Congratulations, you bought games for those systems at $145 adjusted for inflation.
I find it funny how all of the games that cost $70 are also really really shit too. Its just an easy way to gauge if the corporation cared more about profits then passion.
i bet most of the gaming companies that want this doesn't realize I wont buy their game for 100 bucks
I do not care about "adjusted for inflation". My salary has stayed the same. Games don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
When they get over 2x less sales whenever they 2x the price, it just doesn't seem very smart to start doing an inflation pricing model for video games...
@@mountaink2zEh they won't tho. People buying at full price are buying to be there day 1. They are far less sensitive to price because they're buying with full knowledge it'll be cheap on sales in a few months
There is 0 chance your salary is the same as it was 20 years ago lol
Even if you somehow managed to do that the avarage went up
If you want a game of the same/better quality of RDR2, yes, they do need hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. You can't have your cake and eat it too
But RDR2 Is A Timeless Gem.
It's A Quality Product Worth It's Dime.
Developers Pushing Out 10 Different Games A Year Aren't Putting Out Quality Content And Thus Shouldn't Be Priced As The Same.
@@PPedroFernandes
100 EU is literally a quarter the normal price of a console. Absolutely no way I'm paying that for a single game. Even spending 50 on a game is a rare event for me.
Publishing companies will 100% do both high prices and microtransactions. Recurring revenue is perceived as more valuable than single transaction revenue. This is why you see subscriptions for everything. Microtransactions themselves have CRAZY margins. They already made the game and the framework in which to have all of this digital crap and then they pay a lone artist to make some cosmetic thing or just have AI do it now, and then they get to sell that over and over and over for like $5 which is 7% of the original price of a $70 game. Micro transactions are a no brainer for the decision makers which is why they are a thing.
All the talk about inflation missed an important point.
Wages.
Wages didnt grow and so the actual amount of discretionary spending is being choked.
Unless you work in the public/government sector.
Personally the more micro transactions the lower the product should cost to buy. Call of Duty titles should be free to play, especially since certain platforms cost money to play them online.
I mean warzone is free to play, so you're not far off.
you don't have to buy micro transactions. gta online is also free
about the pay to play online thats sony and xbox making the money from that call of duty doesn't actually get ANY of the the pay to play online nor do they get a say the consoles force them to abide by it
I’m not even burying for 70€ ,60€ was and is my limit
GTA 5 has grossed 8.6 Billion since launch. A large portion of that was from micro transactions from GTA online. They cancelled the planned single player DLCs to put out more online content. I think they'll more than make up for the initial purchase price with future online purchases.
if they do what they did with rdr2 online it won't be as big. that games online dropped with barely any content and item prices so absurd you had to grind hours for basic tools and clothes.
@@waggish4999rest assured that not only will they copy rdo insane economy but will most likely quadruple down on making it grindier! And it's gta 6. They're not going to abandon it like rdo. Gta 6 online WILL most likely be around for the next 20 years no joke.
@@waggish4999I am shocked that didn’t happen to GTAO. I played on 360 and it sucked. Repeating the most meta missions for hours to get a mid truck that you needed insurance for?
It was the antithesis of GTA. It was supposed to be fun chaos. Instead I was grinding to pay bills. Tried again when heists finally launched but eh, they always failed with randoms.
I know GTAO changed a lot since but I don’t care. I’m not paying you more to not grind your crap.
@garythecyclingnerd6219 yeah it started out okay price wise. A $50 shark card was enough to buy multiple good supercars. Now $50 gets you a 2014 honda civic and you can't even afford the upgrades. If it weren't for car dupes and frozen money I would've quit gta long before I did.
4:20 Linus is objectively wrong here, and Xbox Phil Spencer can attest to that. He himself acknowledged that Xbox lost the most crucial generation of console competition during the PS4 era because most people built up their digital libraries during those years. When XBOX series and PS5 came along, the choice for those people was already made, they wanted to keep their digital games, and it's a big reason why Xbox is still far behind on this generation despite having a good console and a good service.
Excellent point. I’m one of those customers that went from 360 to PS4 and began buying digital. Naturally it lead to going with a PS5 to keep accessing those games without needing the ps4.
Executives can afford to be paid less and the actual developers should be paid more if the prices are to rise.
**Edit - I am also in the fortunate category of people who can afford to buy these games even with the price increase so for me, I would rest easier at night if I knew the extra money I’m spending went to the people who worked on the games.
Agreed,
- and which branch of government should enforce and audit those changes?
But they won't agree to that
@ idk man I’m not qualified to answer that. It’s just something that should happen for the good of our love of video games.
We all know that'll never happen.
@@SegmentWIRS. Change the tax code on corporate profits and the highest income brackets, same as it was before Reagan
Games are getting more expensive to make. The rumor is GTA6 costs over $1B to make. $100 wouldn’t shock me
Also, I’d love to know the percentage of gamers buying deluxe editions or collectors editions which are already close to if not $100.
The issue is that most AAA games are already not worth $70. They continue to charge full price while making half baked disappointment after disappointment. Indie games are the only thing actually pushing the market forward, with way to many fun options for under $20 for me to ever justify spending $100 for the yearly release of cod or whatever junk ea/ubisoft is pushing out.
You are playing the wrong AAA, then.
Which AAA titles were good and not broken and riddled with micro transactions?
@@SuperWotmanmonster hunter knocks it out of the park every time.. although admittedly it is riddled with cosmetic microtransactions but hey you usually buy a shit game and then get shit microtransactions so that's something I guess
@@dragonicbladex7574monster hunter has been basically the same game with minimal upgrades across all vectors for many generations. It’s basically cod with dragons
UK is also screwed financially things are just getting worse and worse and our news is talking about every other country and not thinking about us so we feel you Canada 🇨🇦
Microtransactions are to games what ads are to streaming. They said that by paying a monthly fee you wouldn't get ads, but since ads are so profitable, now you get to both pay monthly AND get ads. And their profits have skyrocketed
Which streaming platform has ads on paid access?
@@wapniak666hulu and Netflix recently added an ad supported tier. Thats two I can think of off the top of my head.
@wapniak666 Netflix, Prime, Hulu, probably others too, I don't remember all.
@@wapniak666 Prime
@@wapniak666 netflix and hulu has paid tiers with ads
Man I don't even buy $70 games. $60 was already a lot now they wanna jump straight to $100. I know there's a lot of people that will just buy it which is unfortunate but the only way I'd ever pay $100 for a game is if there are no micro transactions. Which it seems the more expensive a game is the more transactions there are which doesn't make sense.
Its fine let them do it, some people will buy it, most wont. Overall they will sell a fraction of what they did with GTA5 and reduce the price accordingly.
Just dont buy it at release and teach them a lesson
how are you determining what is "too much" for a video game?
@ not true, they will still blow their targets out as rockstar creates an amazing product
About the pub bit, let's also not forget that a business that has been running for 30+ years has cleared their initial expenses like their mortgage. It's like those small family owned local restaurants that serve cheap food. Once the owners sell, with the prices of real estate now, either the menu prices blow up to cover for the new mortgage of the new owners, or the business closes and the building becomes something else.
It's unlikely any game dev studio is occupying the same space for 30 years
At some point most of them need to grow so there is recurring costs of acquiring or renting new place
@wapniak666 oh, my comment is only about the bit where they talk about pubs, it's a completely different story for game studios :)
@@TheBigBus111 oh, my bad, I missed that
@@wapniak666 No worries, have a nice day!
a misunderstanding on the internet that ended in a peaceful conversation, apologies and greetings.
there might be hope for humanity, there might just be a little hope!
The thing I hate about modern times - is the apex greed. It stands that GTA6 will sell more copies than the last… keep it the same price, but nah - gotta greed the greed
does not matter what they price it at . . I'm picking up a free copy from a "legal" site . . then I will pay $20 during discount/sale.
good luck playing online
@@user-ko2fq2hg8b you mean the worst part of the last gta game that was so grindy and so filled with micro-transactions to mitigate that grind and that rockstar pumped full of ludicrously powerful unfun mechanics to try and push people to pay those prices to grief? Oh no..... anyway.
@@user-ko2fq2hg8b Why woudl you want to, the peopel suck, the gameplay is designed to drain money from you and the online servers make the entire experience luck of the draw as to if you can even play half the time.
@@jacobely6826I really tried to like GTA online, but exactly like you said, 10 minutes into some mildly fun objectives I'd get taken out by some random on a rocket powered motorbike!? Pointless.
@@user-ko2fq2hg8b I’ve never bought a GTA game for it’s online content. I play for the story. Once I’m finished with the story, I’m finished with the game
I’d pay $200 for GTA6 without microtransactions
100$ game is a no buy for me
wait for a fucking discount in next year
i dont think i even bought a 70$ game yet waited for them to go lower to at least 60$
I think my most expensive game is like 50-60$ but 80% of my games are 20$ or under
i dont even bother buying games that are like 50 ngl i wait for sales
yup. Just means I'll buy less games each year and I already buy very few because of the $70 price tag. It's not even that I can't afford it, it's just not worth it in my mind. I'm going back to reading more books this year
Then don't get it. $100 for a game that will provide hundreds if not a thousand hours of playtime is more than worth the investment
I highly doubt that. But continue living in that delusion
If all the companies deliver the same quality as rockstar I'm paying even double that, problem is none of those companies go through 10 years of development to deliver perfection.. so they have no right to compare themselves to rockstar because they are playing on a whole different level
Gta Trillogy cant be bothered to update RDR2 PS4 and GTA 4 on PS3
Is it going to be the most cracked game ever?
If multiplayer is as broken as GTA5s now, definitely. I will not pay full price for half the functionality, they literally shut it down with deciding against enabling Proton support.
Denuvo hasn't been cracked in a couple of years.
GTA VI likely will use it just like RDR2 and GTA V did.
@@mondodimotoriI think gta 6 will be big enough for some people to at least take a swing at cracking it might take a while but it will probably be cracked
@@mondodimotoribecause no one playing that shit lol
@@mondodimotoriNeither RDR2 nor GTA5 used Denuvo for DRM. There were rumors about it back then, but they were wrong. Rockstar uses its own DRM protections, like Social Club DRM and Steam DRM.
- RDR2 took about a year to be cracked. (Bcs of always online)
- GTA 5 was cracked within the first week by 3DM.
I don’t know where you’re getting your confidence in your false claims from..
Back in the day a video game had less than a year to make money before was pull out from store shelves, nowadays a digital game can still make money even after 20 years of release
i'd agree with him if wages had kept up with inflation . . but they have not!
inflation is supposed to mean that there is more money available and thus
the prices for stuff rise because the money is worth less if there is more.
not just prices rise and not money availability!
Talk about a drop in socializing... I just met my neighbor yesterday. We've lived where we are since 2014 & they moved in in winter 2019. Then COVID happened and no one socialized anymore. I hadn't even clocked that we had never talked.
I think Rockstar can afford to sell GTA6 for $100, but it's not a luxury that other publishers have given the very disappointing numbers of sales. Some games not even for free
They can afford sell it for 1$ because that's not how they're making money for the last 10 years lol.
If GTA 6 would have same online mode as 5 and will have retail price of 50+ USD - than it's a robbery.
@@Chastity_Belt $50-$60 for the single player seems fair.
@@gordonoboh833 100% there would be online mode included, surely it will have microtransactions from day one
And I can bet GTA 6 would be a worst GTA ever, even worse than 5
@@Chastity_Belt tf you mean . . .5 was the second best gta
@@notcapnbloodbeard nuh
3 was good (for it's time of course), SA was kinda legendary, 4 was a masterpiece
But 5 is literally a downgraded 4, game made for the kids but with sex jokes and a lot of violence (too much even for GTA in some cases)
They even managed to make game less fun because of shitty physics, even more stupid AI and super dumb police searching system
Gta 5 is the worst gta so far
It is entertaining for masses, apparently, but it doesn't make it less shit
I don’t care, make it $350, release the game!!!
I think we have problem with this conversation when one side is saying "We don't want these games, we don't like it, stop doing what you're doing!" and the other is going "You don't understand, we need to raise prices to keep doing what we are doing!". You can't keep telling players they don't own their game, they can expect quality, they can't expect finished products on release day, they need to pay for microtransactions on games they bought, and then also claim they are paying too little and compare it to games that used to come a lot of plastic, actual electronic hardware, were heavy, had printed manuals, maps, sometimes even extras, and were finished products you owned entirely.
Overall, I don't buy AT ALL the excuse that prices are too low. They are low, but they at where they should be. The gaming industry is one of the most profitable in the world. The industry just wants the line to go up even more than it already is. I can understand if games like Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring or GTA are exceptions, because their production value is that much higher than anything else, but most AAA games aren't worth their price on sale.
What the industry needs to understand is that, due to economy and general player expectation, we want more AA, cheaper, experiences with less commitment. I'm way more likely to pay 40$ for a solid 40$ experience than 100$ for maybe a 100$ experience.
The expectations of public shareholders is simply incompatible with the market reality. There are not enough people with enough free time and money to continue to grow this market. It’s saturated.
Remember, with public companies, it’s not enough to make money. You need to make more than the previous fiscal year.
Thank you for this comment, this is what the reality of the situation is like.
the thing is yeah videogame prices have stagnated but if you think about it you used to get a lot more value out of it before than you do now
$60-$70 used to give you a game that you fully own and can install regardless of whether you have internet connection or not and you didn't worry about the servers shutting down in a few years completely locking you out of the game
oh and no microtransactions
I hate the fact that physical media games and digital games with PlayStation are the same price.
hostile takeover. at the beginning I started buying digital cus it was cheaper, now that they took over they even dare to increase price whenever
It’s the convenience factor that PSN, Nintendo and xbox prey on. We’ll eliminate the need to wait for launch day to go and buy a game, eliminate the need to go to a store etc. although nowadays everything is digital anyways, buying a disc just activates the download from servers. This is the appeal of game pass, no need to go and buy titles when you can play hundreds of games. Granted it’s not as good, and Microsoft can remove titles at any point. But to a consumer that plays a lot of casual games, it can be enticing.
@@peturf1788 Information: "buying a disc just activates the download from servers."
This is because discs are an obsolete medium and don't have the performance for the game to actually run off the disc anymore, the disc is basically just a key to unlock content at this point that runs off your substantially more performant NVME SSD
Yeah, so you should NEVER buy digital unless the digital version is steeply discounted.
LTT released a video a year or so ago, and yeah phyical copies you can sell at/on gamestop/ebay
Not if you buy used on ebay after a few months
One other point to consider is the old physical medium aspect.
For a long time games were coming in elaborate boxes/cases for consoles and PC as well as full color manuals.
These days you get cases are a cheap flimsy plastic or you are buying it digitally.
I’m not paying full price for games now, I play my backlog and pick up games a few years later. They can set their prices to anything they like, I’ll get it when and if it’s down around 20$ to 30$. It’ll get there eventually.
I admire your patience.
Well done (also damn true 👍)
Here in Zimbabwe, the PS4 generation of consoles had a huge number of physical copies being sold. Very few would actually buy digital copies.
It better be the most perfect, bug-free video game if they’re making us pay $100. So many modern AAA games are not worth the asking price and feel unfinished.
and those unfinished should be less money, not make the normal standard of a finished product more expensive
I think my concern is, people are going to start to be priced out of gaming as prices rise. Gaming pc, consoles cost a lot already, each game costing $100 on top of that doesn’t sound feasible. But the market will decide that.
Good - Piracy will rise again
The good news is that only a select few games actually sell for $60 or $70 as it stands, versus an absurd wealth of fantastic cheaper ones-seriously, there are more Overwhelmingly Positive rated (popular with >95% positive reviews) games on Steam under $20 than you could hope to beat in a lifetime, with frequent sales under $10 or even $3, not to mention free-to-play titles. The limited libraries and locked-down marketplaces of consoles might make finding such great deals harder, but on PC, there's really no excuse; it's just that most people are accustomed to just buying the yearly AAA slop and calling it a day. But there's a better way.
3:01 you know what else is massive
this segue!
I think the biggest problem with raising costs is the amount of purchases expected or necessary after the initial cost. DLC, in-game purchases and micro-transactions have taken over single- and multiplayer games and can’t just be ignored.
With companies like Ubisoft locking single player content (like weapons and outfits) behind premium currencies, there is no justification to raise prices.
The biggest issue with physical copies these days is that you have to install every single game you get on a disk like you would a digital game; they’ve become cd keys. 360 era; you had a disk, you put it in and then you’re playing your game. But now since the Xbox One/PS4 you have to install every single thing. And so the ultimate endpoint is “why don’t I just buy digital?” I honestly thought games would be sold on usb sticks by now.
I didn't expect to be here, but I'm glad I am
And this is why I avoid AAA games these days. I already thought $60 was bad enough but when they managed weasel their way to $70 I finally had enough.
Spider-man 2 just released on PC yesterday for $80-90Cad with tons of bugs and crashes based on many reviews. I knew I was waiting for it to go on sale before it released. $90+ dollars for a 2 year old game is crazy!
90+ for a 2 year old game that doesn't work is crazy
Wait for a very good discount. I got a free code for the PS from a friend and sure its fun but feels all over the place and like 30% of actually planned things are missing.
The way for GTA6 to make the most money is to make it free to play with even more aggressive micro-transactions than shark cards, the FOMO of missing out on Season 1 cosmetics for GTA by not having time to complete everything in the game will make more money than copies of the game itself. The more people playing the more they will make.
I am still a fan of physical media. I still do not buy much digital media. In fact, the majority of digital media is stuff not available physically.
You need to also adjust for the number of people that purchase the game. In the SNES generation, video game players were children and young adults. At this point, not only children are playing games, but all the way up through people in their 40’s/50’s are a huge segment of game sales. The sheer number of people buying games is massive compared to 20-30 years ago. So even though the margins are smaller, the purchasing volume is massive. Development is obviously much more costly to counterbalance. Nintendo used to make mariokart with a team of like 8-12 developers on N64. These days…development teams are in the 100’s to 1000’s for AA and AAA titles.
GTA 6 can charge more and it will sell but the second a game from like ubisoft or EA does the same no one will buy it and the company will blame the customer and not themself
We also don’t normally “buy” games anymore, we license them for use as long as the company let them be played.
Ajdust wages for inflation. And then I have nothing against it.
Halo 3, an almost 18 year old game, sold for 60 dollars. Its kinda nuts how long weve been at that price point.
the thing is, GTA 6 will likely be a game worth that much money considering the amount of content it will likely have. this does not mean companies making the same game for the 7th time deserve to sell their games for the same price
I resonate with what Luke said about having to do difficult things to earn cosmetics. It was awesome earning my assassination armor in Halo 4. It's nice when you see someone with a specific cosmetic and you're like "woah, that guy worked hard for that"
If they want to charge $100 for a game
- All DLCs should be included
- No microtransactions
- Game should be super optimized and not ask for 8-10gb vram on 1080p highest settings
If they want to charge $100 for a game: make a good game. That's it, nothing else matters. Release a dozen paid DLCs, tons of microtransactions, the game can be an unoptimized mess, that all is irrelevant if the game is good.
your pointing out good points but that shouldn't make a game go on sale for 100 in the past games wouldn't sell for that much and they did all that for a lower price.
if anything I think they should lower the spec requirement if it pushes the price of the game so much since a lot of GPU's are pretty strong and should be able to run a lot a games smoothly no problem.
honestly a game shouldn't not be priced at 100 at all, unless it gives full dive VR experience and you get to actually be in the game or something.
I think another thing is there is a massive problem with over-budgeting in the AAA games section of the industry. You have Metaphor: ReFantazio selling a million units and being hailed as a commercial success and then you have Final Fantasy XVI selling 3 million units in 3 days and being declared a disappointment.
Here in Australia, PS4 games were cheaper physically than digital. We were seeing $79AUD physical and $100 AUD on the PlayStation Store
Yeah, that's still the case with PS5 games. Astro Bot is $110 digitally (down to $94 on sale periodically), while it was available at launch physically for $80 and has dropped to under $70 during sales. Stellar Blade's digital RRP is $125 but physically it was $109 on day one.
Pub closures in Ireland have been rough, I visit often and can see the changes. Had a Google and it looks like in 2023 about 144 closed. However, where I am in the UK, 769 closed in 2023 and in 2024, 50 pubs closed every month. The amount of places I've frequented, that just no longer exist, it's pretty grim.
they also dont have to pay for disks or carts anymore
The cost of disks and packaging is almost irrelevant to the full cost of a game. It's literally plastic that cost CENTS per copy to manufacture in mass.
But you could argue, some costs comes from different platform releases. Usually and the biggest player in this regard is steam and they take a 30% cut. Relatively the same cost as making a physical CD.
@@ebhaenger8246true but in regards to the snes comparison, 30% was paid to the retailers which is no different from steam. I personally think consumers have to call out businesses, not just game studios that benefited from switching to online by cutting down even the pennies for cds while keeping the costs same if not more to purchase an online license. We, the consumers let that happen to the point where these businesses expect you to pay a subscription or micro transactions over the initial price which grants a mere base game license.
@@mondodimotori But then you get the costs of logistics and shipping tied into that as well.
Not everything needs to be affected by “inflation” most people’s wages didn’t change since $60 was the standard, therefore it’s literally just a price increase like everything else. You can’t just calculate the “rate of inflation” and say “$100 is the same as $50 during this year” that’s not actually how that works. Plus games sell more copies and are cheaper than they’ve ever been to make, they don’t need to adjust, they’re doing just fine.
microtransactions make way more money than any first price increase it will never happen
With the whole social interaction thing is that COVID didn't help with making us have the habit of just staying inside, but also the fact that we're all kinda living pay to pay already trying to get by. So we really don't have it in our budget week to week (or if you get paid biweekly, 2 weeks to 2 weeks) to be able to go out and invite friends (if we have any LOL) to grab something to eat or get a drink. As for the price of GTAVI being $100, I will most likely preorder the game just because it's Rockstar, but a lot of other game publishers I don't think are deserving to be able to release games at such a price, now hear me out on this. We've had a lot of instances of games being rushed, pushed out unfinished, and sometimes unplayable. Take Cyberpunk for example. Cyberpunk was released with so many bugs, performance issues, and even play ability issues on console. Same goes for the Call of Duty franchise. Every year we get a shit out game from Activision, and yet every year the game has bad maps, horrible connection issues with being able to create lobbies with friends, massive amounts of cheaters, the list goes on. Yet every year they shit out a new Call of Duty title and call it a day. If we have a price hike on games, there needs to be some give on actually giving us finished games and good ones at that, not some half assed shit we've been getting. Games like Elden Ring, Bulders Gate, and whatnot are great games that definitely would've benefited from being sold for more, and should have. I agree that it's not fair to compare to the NES cartridge, but we also should keep in mind the server upkeep for online play, and also distributing the game files for people to download at home, which I'm sure takes a ton of bandwidth as we've seen from how slow download speeds can be with downloading games, updates, and whatnot from Steam or any other game library like it.
We've got GTA 5 before GTA 6!
damn how i missed that news, going to buy gta5 asap
Other advantages of physical media, when licenses expire they can't 'take it back' as you have the physical media on hand
With rising production costs and inflation it does make sense AAA game prices will rise. However these CEOs are still being paid by the truckload, devs are still being made to crunch to excess, and microtransactions are still getting whales to spend thousands. I have no confidence the extra money is going anywhere it needs to be.
If wages aren't growing where are these "inflated costs" coming from aside from CEOs robbing the place blind.
I don't know if I'm in a common situation but for me the biggest thing for me isn't inflation but cost of living being the limiting factor. I definitely wouldn't be able to buy a 100$ game often. I could see one factor to why microtransactions being so effective for companies being it's lots of smaller purchases which are easier to fit into a budget more often
Inflation is rising but at the same time Salaries are not. Companies are more profitable than ever but the same growth is not reflected on employees' salary. Already game prices are High AF and corporations want a game to cost half the price of a console is crazy.
People started buying video games digitally around 2010 when indie games came out for consoles (like Super Meat Boy) because they had no choice. Physical versions were not available or extremely expensive. Since that era, I think people prefer owning physical games for consoles, given the choice.
In my own experience with console gaming friends and co-workers, your average joe was fairly likely to just make a digital purchase a lot of times, they would occasionally get a physical copy for something special like maybe a GTA game, but they were seemingly just as likely to get a digital copy so it loads faster(sometimes after already buying physical and getting tired of swapping the discs to play a different game.) These were not people i would describe as techies by any stretch of the word, meanwhile my friends that were in the tech industry through and through they would much rather purchase physical, even to this day, and often the expensive deluxe editions with extra stuff to put on display.
If you support game creators and want them to create things you want, you will support this.
For pubs closing, at least in the uk, what is happening is that chains such as Weatherspoons buy them and turn them in to the fast food equivalent of a pub. The building remains mostly the same (usually with some slot machines added) but the quality of the food especially goes down the drain.
I prefer physical games over digital for the resale value. Also the ability to swap games with my friends and family is something I love.
I don't have a problem with them making the game more expensive at launch for the early adopters, the true fans who absolutely must play the game on release. I have always been one to wait patiently until a game goes on sale for a price I'm willing to pay, as at this point i'm just adding it to my growing library of unplayed games. It seems that this has always been the case that games launch at a high price, and then come down in price over time to open up the geme to more and more people, which doesn't necessarily happen with just games but just about anything we buy.
In Australia things are pretty dire over here as well, probably on par with Canada.
My city used to be filled with Irish Pubs all over town, now I can only think of one that's left.
I bumped into someone I haven’t seen in over five years ago when grocery shopping here in Scotland. We both agreed the pandemic has almost given both of us an aversion to just meeting people and hanging out, and to be honest it’s turned into a habit just being at home all the time.
The industry views it from the lense of missing profit but incomes have been flat for a long time. We keep having to absorb increasing costs but there is a limit.
The idea that it takes 300million to make a game is their problem, not mine.
The comparison to the SNES cartridges is fair since it shows the amount of factors that have been cut.
It seems like they just forgot the fact because of inflation we all now have less $ for discretionary spending.
$100 USD is $161~ AUD here in Australia.
There is not a single video game, including GTA VI, that I could ever justify spending that amount of money on, and truth be told, not because I couldn't afford it. I'm not wealthy but I'm not poor either; just the principle of that is ludicrous. There is so much more value I could get out of $160 AUD elsewhere.
I'm a cinema buff, I pay on average roughly $15 AUD (about $13.50 AUD for a standard ticket, $18.50 AUD for a premium format ticket) for a cinema ticket, and bring snacks and a drink from home or a nearby grocery store (we don't have to sneak food in here, you're just allowed to). I could watch 8.7 movies for the price of one game, and that's assuming I see all of them in a premium format. I'd do that over buying one video game every day of the week ending in Y.
I like video games (I have a 7800X3D and a RTX 4080 in my computer that only gets used for web browsing and gaming, to prove that I do value spending money on it) but the price ceiling of games is already at it's max for me, especially being a PC gamer who suffers almost every time I buy a game on release day and it either doesn't work, or works extremely poorly almost every time.
People keep leaving out the fact that they could totally get away with it. Because, first of all, it's one of if not the biggest game(s) of all time, which means people must have it and can't help themselves. And, unless they literally can't afford it, they will buy it regardless of the price. So, T2 can absolutely get away with pricing this game anywhere from 80 to 100 or even up to say 120. - Another detail people seem to leave out is that there can and probably will be different versions, like a premium "Deluxe Edition" and whatnot, who knows some kind of Collector's Edition, which will all be more expensive than the "base" version anyway, so if perhaps the regular version would be 70-80, the premium version could be 100-120 (maybe even 130/140) and some kind of collector's version could be way more, like 200-250-300 or whatever. (I mean, even 'Starfield' had a physical collector's edition of over 300 I believe. It didn't sell out, cause of the game's reputation, but there you have it.)
And people keep bringing up the micro-transactions, but they do not care that it would "offset the price/cost" or anything. That's none of their concern. They will just do whatever they can get away with and that's probably a lot. I mean, what are people gonna do, NOT buy GTA??... That'll be the day! - People might bitch and moan, but still begrudgingly throw their money at it because, like I said, they can't help themselves. People consider this crap to be like a holy grail or something, so they must have it and they will think it's worth about anything cause "it will have so much replay-value", besides the fact that people just want to be one of the first, not to mention all the content-creators wanting to generate all their content and views with it.
I would not be surprised if this game would cost over 70/75, if not at LEAST for like a "launch period" of like a week or a month or whatever, to then drop back to like 70 to make it seem like it's a better deal on top of that so that it will get another sales-boost not long after the initial release. - And don't forget that they're also really stingy on discounts for years after release, as it will take even like 4 years for it to drop below 50% off. - They WILL maximize the price-tag as much as possible for maximum profit.
Let’s be real. The “dollars for minutes of fun” on any videogame is just insane. Games should cost thousands if a theater ticket is $20 for 2h of entertainment
The issue with the price increase is that they will still have the fsr/dlss/intels upscale as a requirement for cards that brand new and its a 5 to 600 dollar card.
the normalisation of sales is nothing but amazing for companies. they arent making less money now that they are doing more sales. the people who buy games during these sales rather than when they are full price, are the same people who 10 years ago would only buy games pre-owned. so these companies are making more money than ever with these tactics.
Rockstar’s budget for GTA 6 is $2 billion dollars. If other companies are willing to spent that money to make high quality Single Player Campaign’s, with a free online addition, then absolutely charge $100.
The difference is that R* can charge $100 because its the biggest budget game ever and the most anticipated game ever. This is not some ubisoft game that they release half assed every 3 years. This is expected to be the pinnacle of gaming for years to come. Toyota doesn't charge Koenigsegg money for a Camry just because the Jesko is 3 million.
GTAV was the first ever game to sell for an equivalence of 1 billion dollars. Asking for $100 is insane when their track record has always been well received
I think a better metric for if game prices should go up is if margins change. If margins go down then prices should go up and vice versa. Also Nintendo still moves tons of physical games compared to Sony and Microsoft.