Why GTA 6 Absolutely Cannot Be Priced Too High

If Grand Theft Auto VI dares to cost 100 pounds, I'll eat a whole bag of raw onions. I'm betting that won't happen, but what if it does? Let's explore what could unfold. (Please don't let my jinx come true — I really don't want to eat raw onions.)

Including developer Rockstar itself, many are convinced that GTA 6 will shatter the record for the biggest video game launch in history — after all, the current record holder is GTA 5. Come November, Rockstar and publisher Take-Two will certainly be popping champagne bottles, but will it be a celebration or a funeral? After all, weddings and funerals look remarkably similar; the difference is only in the context.

GTA 5 remains one of the most expensive games ever made, with its development and marketing costs reportedly exceeding $250 million combined. GTA 6 has left that number in the dust long ago — a lengthy and troubled development cycle, leaked data, internal disputes, and more have all added to the burden. Rockstar is also said to have poured staggering resources into realistic glass-breaking effects, water physics, and beyond.

Considering Rockstar once created "horse testicles that expand and contract with the changing seasons," this level of craftsmanship isn't surprising. So the rumor that GTA 6's cost has already far exceeded $1 billion sounds highly plausible (and that's not even including marketing costs for the coming months).

In short, GTA 6 needs to become one of the best-selling games of all time just to recoup its costs. Given the lengthy development cycle and astronomical budget, GTA 6 must achieve absolutely terrifying launch sales to be considered a success: if day-one sales fall below 20 million, it would likely be viewed as a failure. Even if the game makes more money than some countries, it could still trigger massive layoffs, because that's just how absurd this world is.

You can't exactly go shoplifting just to afford GTA 6.

In a global economy where crises could erupt at any moment and the cost of living is skyrocketing exponentially, ordinary households have had their disposable income squeezed to near nothing. In this environment, even a small problem could turn the celebratory fireworks into a devastating blow aimed at the gaming industry.

So it's understandable that Take-Two's CEO is worried: if they make a mistake on such a fundamental issue as game pricing — especially the base edition's price point — the consequences could be catastrophic. Not just for their company, but potentially for the entire industry.

Despite the staggering amount of money poured into its lengthy development, GTA 6 will certainly make a fortune. No one disputes that. The question is whether it can make "enough" — and once shareholders enter the picture, determining what counts as "enough" becomes a very tricky matter.

This is GTA 6's first problem: even if it breaks gaming's commercial records, it could still fall short of investor expectations.

For a publicly traded company, "success" is an incredibly difficult concept to define. The standard can shift at any moment, influenced by countless uncontrollable external factors: we live in a vast global economy governed by chaos theory, where a butterfly flapping its wings or a cargo ship running aground could spawn a tornado on the other side of the planet — or send a single banana's price soaring to $20.

If GTA 6 had launched in 2025 as originally planned, few would have worried about its pricing. But now it's arriving in a year when the tech and entertainment industries are both struggling. The rising costs of manufacturing and selling computer hardware have already crushed company after company, turning what was once a mainstream hobby into a luxury.

Middle-class consumers find it increasingly hard to justify non-essential spending. Things like gas prices, electricity bills, and food costs — which people used to barely think about — are now draining paychecks. For more and more people, even the standard $70 price tag for AAA games has become a burden. No matter how popular or anticipated a game is, entertainment products are ultimately not necessities for survival. The higher the price, the more people will wait for a sale.

In a world driven by stock market sentiment, if GTA 6's sales don't meet investor expectations during those crucial first weeks, it's not just a big problem for Take-Two — investor confidence in the entire industry would take a serious hit.

If even the biggest cash cow can't produce enough gold coins, what hope is there for other projects? You could call those investors foolish, short-sighted, and self-destructive, but stock market capital is often driven by irrational sentiment.

In short, perception and momentum are everything: if public opinion decides GTA 6 is "too expensive," it likely won't meet investor expectations in its launch week, triggering far-reaching ripple effects.

Developers work hard so their bosses can live in houses with swimming pools.

If weak sales are only short-term, it might not be fatal — after all, GTA has tremendous long-tail effects: GTA 6 will eventually become the foundation of GTA Online 2.0. The reason GTA 5 has enjoyed such enduring success is largely due to its ever-expanding, ever-evolving online mode. It's this terrifying ability to generate continuous revenue that allowed Rockstar, while other game companies were falling into crisis, to spend nearly a decade and over a billion dollars developing GTA 6.

But if the barrier to entry is too high, GTA Online 2.0's appeal to players will be severely diminished. More players will stick with its biggest competitor — the old version of GTA Online that will continue to operate after GTA 6's release. Existing GTA Online players won't necessarily migrate automatically: convincing players to leave a mature platform stacked with massive content for a "bare-bones" experience is a challenge every large online community faces during upgrades. Growth requires new pastures, but you can't force people to eat grass.

We've already seen an unimaginable crash-and-burn with Red Dead Online. Once considered a sister project or successor to GTA Online, it's now been left to fend for itself, because it just never had that magic.

A Western-themed online mode is certainly very different from GTA Online's urban setting, but the core DNA shares much in common. Given that Red Dead Redemption 2 itself was a massive hit, there was every reason to believe Red Dead Online could attract a new audience — even stand shoulder-to-shoulder with GTA Online. But it just wasn't meant to be.

Red Dead Online couldn't replicate GTA Online's success.

GTA 6's long-term prospects are now filled with uncertainty, which means Rockstar's unique position in the industry — and its model of "using enormous financial resources to create premium masterpieces" — is no longer unassailable.

Finally, the real issue is that almost the entire industry is terrified of GTA 6, yet simultaneously deeply dependent on its success. Every time GTA 6 gets delayed, competitors frantically adjust their release schedules to get out of the way — like Moses parting the Red Sea. This has already affected the livelihoods of many in the industry who may have no direct connection to GTA at all, yet whose studios and publishers must navigate the massive waves kicked up by GTA 6.

The gaming media ecosystem is also in constant turmoil. We keep pinning our hopes on the hype generated by GTA 6, only to have those expectations dashed twice already, leading to widespread chaos.

Things were never supposed to be this way. The gaming industry once prided itself on being "recession-proof," believing it didn't need to conform to outside judgments about "what counts as art" or "what qualifies as a legitimate hobby."

Now we're discovering that the lipstick effect may not actually hold. If a real economic crisis hits, we might be among the first to feel the impact. How did we get here? As much as I love this series, I never imagined that the most culturally significant entertainment product of my lifetime would be a vulgar, over-the-top satirical game filled with crime and bad taste.

I believe GTA 6 will certainly be a masterpiece, and by any reasonable standard, it will achieve outstanding commercial success — any other outcome is simply unimaginable. But we live in an era where unimaginable things keep becoming reality. So we must prepare for the worst — perhaps GTA 6 won't save the gaming industry after all, but instead trigger the next great gaming industry collapse.

This article is compiled from IGN US content. Original by Jim Trinca. Translation by Tony.