I'm loving the balls on studios. Yesterday we had "experts" suggesting it might cost 100 bux, and today it's already the beggining of a trend. And the game isn't even out. In fact, we only have the trailer for the game and they're already predicting prices.
My prediction is yes, they'll ask 100$ and more, and yes, people will pay it.
But the nerve, I swear. "Yeah, our games have gotten sloppier every year. And yes, we fired tens of thousands solely for profit reasons. But line must go up, so you better start paying"
Just a reminder that no one's forcing you to spend $100 on the game. If enough people refuse to do so the base cost of the game will go down again. Icarus is my most recent for example, I've had it on my wish list for almost a year and a half now, because I wasn't willing to spend $35 on what that game provided. It's currently on sale on Steam for $9.
God of War 2018 is currently $20 on PSN
I got Elden ring for $30 a few months back despite the fact that it's still selling full price at 60.
If y'all are patient and wait they stopped making money on the game which means that they lower the cost to try to incentivize people to buy it.
Plus the first year of sale of a game is The Game's most important release window, because companies generally will use the first year to decide how popular it was. If enough people refuse to buy the game at their original price point it will destroy their sales metric for the first year which will make it harder on the studio to justify to their parent company that it's worth making another game, which means that they're more incentivized to lower the base cost of the game within the first year of launch.
The rate of this is significantly slowed down if everyone is just like oh okay I guess it's $100 now and then buys it anyway, have patience and hold out, especially a game like GTA 6 where they're going to gain more money off microtransactions then people actually buying the game. Honestly GTA 6 probably should have just been sold as a free to play because they operate like one
Playing lots of RPGs and Jrpgs has trained my Patience. I never buy a game at full price, regardless of how much I want it. I simply wait for a sale until it's below 35 euro.
Hot take, a very few games are actually worth the 100$ pricetag. The wrong studios believe their games are worth that much tho. I can see myself buying gta6 for 100 but id probably wait for a good sale lol
I'm not paying if its not below $30, why would i pay for $100? GTA 5 is already disappointing i'm pretty sure they chop even more thing up and make most content online only. $100 is already rm450 in my country and that's almost 1/3 of minimum wages, I'll continue to be stingy and spend my money on better stuff.
It’s surprising that games are getting cheaper compared to the cost of living. If you take into consideration the fact that games are becoming more expensive to produce, I really don’t understand it.
Gaming is way cheaper for me than it was during the ps2 or ps3 era.
I wonder… Will Grand Theft Auto VI be the next “AAAA” game? Or have we ditched that term now since the utter failure of the first game that dared wear that title?
Rockstar I would say is one of the few that can demand that price. I would pay $100.00 bucks cause Im going to play it for the next decade. We could be on GTA15 but rockstar dont roll that way.
It will be funny if they make it free to play because they think maximizing player count will translate into more shark card money than box price + shark cards. Not that I think that is likely, just a funny possibility.
It'll push a shit ton of new pirates, thus creating more headaches for them if $100 games become the new normal. It's almost like they love shooting themselves in the feet with a shotgun and then blaming everyone else as to why they can't walk like they used to.
For one thing, I'm not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I'd be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.
For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called "retail packaged goods" games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That's 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.
That's two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can't even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that's 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.
So basically GTA or no, I don't see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It's MTX-fests or nothing. It's pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you'll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.
AAA games are already $90CAD here with deluxe/special editions going for $120-$160. I can't remember the last time I actually bought one of those games because most of them are trash designed to exploit the player as much as possible. There are a lot of other hobbies I'd rather drop that kind of money on that respect my time heaps more than modern games.
I think Tiny Glade is the only game I play regularly that is an actual new release. Everything else is 5+ years old because I got them on sale for good prices. Also means they're already patched up and usually perform better instead of having people pay $90+ to beta test broken garbage.
I still have a huge backlog of games released in the last 30 years, so I can really easy wait for every game to go into sale.
There is absolutely no need or urge for me to buy any game on release.
They can try, but it might not work. GTA VI has been in development for like more than a decade and will probably have loads of content. I could see $100 being justified. But not every other AAA game would be the same. Most wouldn’t in fact.
That said, video games have been $50-60 for the last 25 years. If they’d kept up with inflation, they’d be close to $110. So, I get it.
This seems fine given the scale of the game and assuming it's not bad, but it's more worrying how it will lead to $100 shovelware five years from now. We already had Zelda at $70 (also worth it) so i could see a trend forming.