Lmao who would believe that gta 6 is not going to make absolute bank? They could give it away for free and still make more money that they could ever spend.
On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down
Submitted 14 hours ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 9 hours ago
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
nucleative@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
GTA 6 is just going to be client app to a universe of micro transactions. They should probably just give it away free.
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 3 hours ago
I don’t even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
NONE_dc@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
People expect games that are ever more ambitious
Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn’t have anything to do with ambition.
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 3 hours ago
People praise expedition 33, that game might as well be an xbox 360 game and it people would still absolutely love it.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I would be perfectly happy with games on average being 30% shorter and 20% uglier if it meant a more sustainable industry. 1440p looks great. Raytracing is really nice and makes development more streamlined. Let’s sit here until like 2035 just fine tuning and optimizing.
filister@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Nowadays games are very repetitive and grindy. That’s very unfortunate as it kills the game. Very few of them have engaging side quests that don’t feel like generic AI generated crap. So longer gameplay doesn’t automatically equate to better quality games.
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Exactly. Look at Nintendo. A fun game doesn’t mean you have to have bleeding edge visuals.
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Dear internet person, this whole discussion is being triggered because Nintendo, of all people, decided $100 was an acceptable price for a video game. They are the asshats who opened the flood gates for the corporate zombies to waltz in.
Binky@lemmy.sdf.org 14 hours ago
That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.
DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
I can’t find the numbers online but they probably could’ve given GTA5 away for free and made a profit.
Forester@pawb.social 14 hours ago
They did give it away for free and make a profit
Kolanaki@pawb.social 12 hours ago
They would have profited making GTA:O free to play, right from the get go.
VirgilMastercard@reddthat.com 12 hours ago
He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they’ll get £0. I’ll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I’m sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Shit the hi fi rush team got laid off. Success doesn’t guarantee shit.
qarbone@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
They were probably on slightly profitable. Or, Money forbid, only breaking even.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Many, if not most, AAA games are actually somewhat risky investments for studios. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.
otacon239@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Absolutely no way Take-Two can afford anything less than $5B in profit every year. The stock market was a mistake.
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
If you really want me to pay $100 for a game, you gotta raise the bar to the fuckin stratosphere compared to what we’re getting now.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 13 hours ago
And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn’t mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they’re complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
zurohki@aussie.zone 12 hours ago
Sorry, best we can do is microtransactions, fear of missing out and AI slop. That’ll be $90.
pm_me_anime_thighs@lemmynsfw.com 12 hours ago
Precisely this. If Baldur’s Gate 3 was 100$, I still would have bought it in a heartbeat because I know that the developers are never gonna ask for any more of my money.
But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I would say gta is one of the only few games I would pay that much for and I know I’ll get my moneys worth, but I’m not interested in gta online. I wish we could get story dlc like we did with gta 4
creamlike504@jlai.lu 14 hours ago
Shame on Harvey Randall for platforming executive bullshit:
The problem, he puts it, is inflation. Which is an unerringly boring but also correct answer: “We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation.”
They’re not responding to the expectations of the people; they’re responding to the expectations of their investors.
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.
Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.
Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.
Heard the same crap about how these “full price games” would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction
This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won’t be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.
molten@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Look. I think all AAA companies should do $120 base price for all games. Piracy would have such a boom. Better platforms. many more seeders and good reviews and more freaks hell bent on cracking DRM.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
There’s one fatal problem with this plan: Nintendo fans.
tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 11 hours ago
That’s hilarious. To your point, I wasn’t going to pay $50 for this, I sure as hell won’t pay $80.
Slab_Bulkhead@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
if rockstar really wanted to win over all gamers, even the ones not planning to play gta, they announce base gta 6 at 50. and then have the 'early/access-10 min early-uber shark complete edition with a unique purple skin at 100 or whatever the fuck they think the whole things worth.
LostWanderer@lemmynsfw.com 14 hours ago
ROFL the more games go $80 to 90 dollars for a base game version, the more I wait for sales. 70 dollars was bad enough in my opinion, but this greed fueled jump is going to put off more potential buyers than it will bring in. It’s my genuine hope that this blows up in their face and will force them to price games reasonably again. Perhaps if the money they made in sales wasn’t mostly funneled into their overpaid CEOs and shareholders, perhaps they’d have more money to cover development costs and keep game prices stable. Sounds like a personal problem to me.
CallateCoyote@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yeah? I’ll buy it when it’s on sale for $35 and they’ll profit, so it’s all good. Patience is a virtue and all that.
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
They’ll charge whatever they think people will pay, and I’m pretty confident that many millions of people will fork over the $80 - $90 at launch. Prices come down when people stop buying.
Skyline969@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Go ahead. I’m back to piracy where needed and patient gaming where possible. These clowns played themselves. AAA games are unreasonable nowadays.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
As of a year ago, GTA 5 had made over $9,000,000,000.
That’s a billion with a B.
Mostly off micro transactions to children.
They don’t need to charge $90, but if people will pay it, they’ll charge it.
dinckelman@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yet again proves that capitalism is a cancer, and they’ll never be happy with anything, except for endless exponential growth
ColdWater@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
Every games is free if you know where to look
caut_R@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
The kinda prices a Mario Kart, Pokemon, or GTA can maybe ask for. Try that on a Star Wars Outlaws and the sales nosedive, I reckon.
I think the industry is gonna try to normalize these prices and crash pretty hard, cause they’ll budget their productions thinking they can sell for 90 bucks but forget they‘re neither GTA nor Mario Kart.
Then again, Dynasty Warriors Origins is 79 on Steam, I wonder how that performed for KOEI.
BromSwolligans@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I mean. Yeah. When Goldeneye came out for the N64 it was like $90 and that was in nintiesbux. We got real used to standardized pricing when discs came around but it’s true that you can’t have it both ways. Now, there’s a reasonable argument to be had over whether Mario Kart World and GTA6 are both gonna be worth >$80. I bought Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey for whatever they retailed for. Was that $70? I can’t remember. But I had more fun and put more hours that year into Hollow Knight, which cost me $15 and kept dumping free DLC for like a year or so afterward. The price was great. The DLC was free. But it also didn’t cost like $2bln or whatever dumbass cost they’re saying GTA6 cost to make.
I didn’t ask them to make it that stupid big and expensive. But some fans did. They’re in that Smash Bros situation where they aren’t allowed not to top the previous entry in terms of scope. So it is what it is.
Should all games be $80-90? Of course not. Should games that cost a billion or more to develop and promise hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay cost $80-90? I think it’s embarrassing and immature to suggest otherwise. Even if you just go back to 2006 and the $60 standard, and adjust that for inflation, you end up at $95. So this isn’t really an argument any serious person should be having when we talk about whether the most expensive game ever made should cost functionally less than its Xbox 360 forerunner.
notgivingmynametoamachine@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Maybe stop spending nigh decades and nigh billions of dollars designing these enormous catch all games that are supposed to appeal to everyone?
I Don’t want to spend 90 dollars on a game that has 400 different things to do, 200 of which I enjoy.
I’d rather give Sandfall 50 bucks for a lovingly crafted, focused game that’s actually, you know, good.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 12 minutes ago
There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.
But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.
Maybe you aren’t excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.
Going purely by “vibes”? I could be “okay” with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
Came here to say this. Stop trying the build the whole universe in a game.