If Grand Theft Auto 6 costs $100, it could kill the AAA gaming industry

A still from the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, featuring the playable character Lucia. Photo: Rockstar Games

Last week, a suggestion from analyst Matthew Ball that Grand Theft Auto 6 could cost $100 sent the video game community into a tailspin.

This is not to say that people wouldn't pay that, of course. Many would, especially since it is the most anticipated game in the history of the medium and one of the most successful ever released. The real question is if the industry will follow suit, pricing future big-budget games, known as AAA games, at $100 going forward.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which released in 2004, cost about $65, which adjusted for inflation equals to $100 today. And even though that game was a global sensation, selling 12 million units by March 2005, it was also reportedly one of the most pirated games in history, which widened its fanbase considerably.

Perhaps counterintuitively, piracy likely helped the widespread adoption of the franchise and helped grow the value of the brand, helping pave the way for GTA 4 in 2008 and GTA 5 in 2013 to become even bigger hits, despite both being released in an era during which piracy fell off considerably, a trend that continues to today.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas released in 2004 and is one of the best selling games of all time. Photo: Rockstar

In the streaming era, PlayStation, Xbox, and even Nintendo console owners can opt for subscription services that allow them access to vast libraries of games for a fee equal to one or two brand-new games. This is a trade that many choose to take. But as a result, gamers have become more selective about which games they choose to pay to play on the day of release.

GTA 6 won’t have any issues convincing anyone to buy it on the first day, it will likely break records whether it costs $100 or $500. The biggest problem with this is the standard it sets in the industry. Rockstar can argue that they have spent years and millions of dollars to make GTA 6, and that they should charge more for it, but will other studios accept that it’s a one off and keep the prices for their releases the same? Unlikely.

Gaming industry analyst and a former gaming executive Mat Piscatella believes that such a change would be unwise, he wrote on his Bluesky account.

"This is ridiculous. There's no need to make the base price of any game $100. Special editions, collector's editions, gold/silver editions, etc do the same thing, and a high percentage of day one buyers jump on those at their elevated price points. There's just no need," he said.

The reason, Piscatella explained, is accessibility. If something costs that high a price, it will limit the number of people that will be enticed to try the game. As a result, it will kill momentum for the game.

"You want to make the funnel as wide as possible, while also optimising launch money. You don't do this be making the base price of a game so high that the funnel narrows. It just makes no sense. At all," Piscatella added.

Grand Theft Auto 6 comes 12 years after the last GTA game, building anticipation for what could be the best selling video game of all time. Photo: AFP Photo, Rockstar Games

If this happens, gamers will become even more selective about which games they choose to buy for full price. Most, if not all games, drop in price in the month following its release. But by then, the judgment on whether or not it was a successful release has gone.

For developers, AAA games are jumping up in cost at an alarming rate. In 2018, the average price of production for a top-tier game was between $50-150 million. By 2023, the average had reached $200 million, and will likely keep rising.

That is too big a gamble, especially when companies often live and die on the success of a single game. If the entry cost is too high, more games will fail, and thus more companies would fail, which could have a ripple effect across the industry.

So even if Rockstar decides to charge $100, and I hope they don’t, it should be accepted as a rare example of a game that can do it, rather than a new industry standard to follow, for its own sake.