It’s not a good time to be in the games industry. Layoffs are constant and studios are getting shut down on a regular basis. Games require more time and money than ever, and competition is only getting more intense. Crunch is also still a thing, making developers not just underpaid, but overworked. Video games are a riskier investment than ever and the future of the medium feels uncertain and unsustainable.
In a report called “State of Video Gaming in 2025”, veteran investment analyst and researcher Matthew Ball of Epyllion looks at a number of industry trends, including how the mobile marketplace is faring, the relevance of emerging markets like China, and the state of AR/VR games. In the last section of the report, titled “How Player, Playertime, and Player Spend Might Return To Growth”, Ball looks at several potential “growth engines” for the industry.
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There are quite a few, including the Switch 2, AI, new game genres, and “non-core” markets, but the one I find most interesting is Grand Theft Auto 6 pricing. The presentation says that while it’ll have a mixed impact on the overall market – we already know everybody and their mother will play this game on launch and ignore everything else for several months and every other game will run and hide from its release window.
But there is also “hope that Take-Two will price GTA 6 at $80 or even $100”, breaking the arbitrary $70 price barrier we have been accustomed to for several years now and letting other studios then make their games more expensive as a net consequence. If any game could pull off a higher base price point knowing that players will still shell out for it, it’s GTA 6, which is shaping up to be the gaming event of the decade. I can’t think of another game with this kind of cultural cache and broad mainstream appeal that has an actual release date.
Obviously, this would make a lot of players unhappy. Despite knowing that this would ultimately be good for the industry, my own instinct was to balk at that price – since I live outside of the U.S. and am a victim of exchange rates, I’m already paying nearly a hundred local dollars for every triple-A game I purchase.
But just past that angry instinct is the knowledge that in order for video game development to be sustainable, prices must be raised. There is no avoiding it, because the way things stand now, the industry cannot sustain itself on the revenue it’s currently making. Gaming studios exist in constant precarity. For workers to have job security, and for one failed game to not be studio-destroying, making video games must be more financially feasible.
Video games started going up in price around the pandemic, and $70 has gradually become the norm for triple-A titles.
While Take-Two is going to make a killing regardless, the more important point here is that it allows other developers and publishers making games of a similar scope but without the same guarantee of success to price their games as such. It’s important to remember that video games are a luxury item, not a necessity, and the cost of making them has gone up – economics dictates the price has to go up, too. However, once the price is raised and it does become the norm, there will be no going back, regardless of how much consumers complain.
But What About The Rest Of The Industry?
I’m speaking in broad terms about the industry, but it’s important to remember that triple-As aren’t the entire industry. There are double-A games and indies too, and I have a feeling that if prices go up, the rest of the industry may suffer the worst of the repercussions.
Because, after all, we’re living under late-stage capitalism. All around the world, the cost of living is rising while wages stagnate. There’s only so much money to go around when you’ve also got to pay rent (you’ll never make enough money to afford a house), put food on the table, and actually try to enjoy the life you end up living.
Not only will GTA 6 leave little room for other games to prosper in its wake, but the money that goes towards triple-A games may be taken away from the budget people have to spend on games as a whole, leaving smaller and independent studios on the back foot. We are not strangers to this distillation of experiences in the gaming space, but I fear that GTA 6 is not only going to accelerate that problem, but potentially be the final nail in the coffin.
Is there another way for the industry to crawl out of this hole? It would be great if CEOs stopped getting raises while laying off their employees en masse, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. And while I’m generally happy to blame corporate figures for the consequences of their mismanagement, there are still larger forces at play here. These spiralling costs are real, for corporations and for small companies. If we don’t want the industry to continue its collapse, we might just have to cough up the cash necessary to make all of this sustainable. It’s bleak, but that’s capitalism.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is an upcoming title in the long-running series from Rockstar Games. Currently scheduled for a 2025 launch, details are few, although it appears to focus on a Bonnie-and-Clyde-like pair of characters.