It’s official: Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be an $80 video game. Take Two recently confirmed the pricing for the upcoming juggernaut in a press release that it published on its website.
The news of GTA 6’s price may not come as much of a surprise to industry pundits. However, casual gamers who don’t follow gaming news that often may experience some sticker shock when seeing its price tag for the first time.
Reports have long suggested that GTA 6 has a development budget of over $1 billion, and with analysts expecting it to sell tens of millions of copies at launch, it’s no wonder why Take Two has decided to charge players a little bit extra for this particular title.
GTA 6 is One of the First $80 Video Games
The last Grand Theft Auto game, GTA 5, released in an era when $60 was the standard for virtually all AAA releases. A lot of time has passed since then, but those who have been out of the loop may not be so satisfied with having to pay $20 extra for what is effectively the same style of game.
Truthfully, it’s unlikely that GTA 6’s $80 price tag will hinder its sales by a large margin. The GTA franchise appeals to an incredibly broad audience of players, many of whom would probably be willing to shell out $100 or more just to play its latest installment at launch (albeit begrudgingly).
At the same time, though, most of these same individuals may not be willing to buy other video games at the $80 price point, even if they’re of a AAA caliber. This, in my humble opinion, is why I firmly believe that GTA 6 is not going to cause the industry-wide price hike that many think it will.
Nintendo and Microsoft Have Attempted $80 Video Games in the Past
$80 video games have been a point of discussion in the gaming industry ever since GTA 6 was first announced. So far, though, there haven’t been many publishers bold enough to release their games at $80, perhaps because they’re not confident that the titles will sell well if they do so.
Nintendo has been one of the sole exceptions in this situation. The company released Mario Kart World for $80 as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2 last year. That being said, it also sold a bundle of the system that came with a copy of the game for just $50 more. Many people who bought Mario Kart World obtained the game that way instead, rather than just shelling out $80 for it.
Microsoft also sought to raise the price of its games to $80 last year, but this experiment it attempted failed miserably. The company tried to sell Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2 at this new price point prior to its launch, but after the game presumably had terrible pre-order numbers, it decided to lower its cost to $70.
All in all, there hasn’t really been a single AAA game that has been sold at the $80 price point, without any caveats whatsoever. This essentially means that GTA 6 will be the first of its kind to cost this much. I don’t think many other games will follow its footsteps, though.
Video Games Haven’t Increased as Much in Price as Other Things Have
We live in a time when consumer goods are getting gradually more expensive. Eggs, movie tickets, RAM… everything seems more pricey than it was a few months ago. The thing about video games, though, is that their cost has not really gone up in proportion to the inflation that the world has experienced these last few years.
As stated previously, there was a period when AAA games cost $60 across the board. That era lasted pretty long, all things considered, as it wasn’t until 2020 when we started to see $70 video games. Even that was just a $10 price increase.
The average video game consumer is not accustomed to paying incrementally higher prices for their video games. Most people expect the cost of games to stay roughly the same for extended periods of time, regardless of how high their individual development budgets were. Because of this, it’s likely that most publishers will stick to $70 video games for the foreseeable future, in spite of GTA 6.
Most Video Games Probably Won’t Follow GTA 6’s Footsteps When It Comes to Pricing
Considering what happened with Microsoft and The Outer Worlds 2, I think it’s safe to say that most people are not yet ready to pay $80 for the majority of video games. GTA 6 is an anomaly; it always has been. If corporations expect gamers to shell out $80 for all of their video games, just because Take Two did so with GTA 6, then they’d be sorely mistaken.
It will probably take a long time for people to accept the $80 price point as the new standard for video games. If that ever does happen, though, GTA 6 will likely be years old by then.
