Game development costs have steadily risen throughout the past decade along with the price of Videogames themselves, and in the past week there have been discussions of game prices going even higher. The possibility of the price tag for the most anticipated title of the year, Grand Theft Auto 6 has been suggested at $100 by Epyllion CEO and analyst Matthew Ball in a detailed presentation on the state of gaming in 2025. Ball has stated that “some gamemakers hope GTA 6 will be priced at $80 to $100, breaking the $70 barrier and helping $50 titles to move up to $60, $60 to do $70, $70 to $80 etc.”
“Packaged game prices have never been lower in real terms than they are today — even though budgets are at all-time highs and player growth is stalled,” Ball writes. “GTA 6 could re-establish packed video game prices after decades of deflation despite rampant cost growth.”
The post started discussion among the gaming community across the internet as to whether the upcoming GTA 6 could indeed cost that much or if the price hike would even be helpful for the industry in any way, but according to several other analysts and industry insiders, the answer is it really won’t.
“There’s just no need,” Matt Piscatella, analyst at Circana wrote in a post on Bluesky. “You want to make the funnel as wide as possible, while also optimizing launch $. You don’t do this [by] making the base price of a game so high that the funnel narrows. It just makes no sense. At all.”
Also it’s important to note that massively popular franchises like Grand Theft Auto or even Call of Duty for that matter, are particularly sensitive to the gaming community and genuinely prefer to not cause anything that could potentially put off or alienate even a small part of their fan base. Which is also one of the reasons why their games are almost always guaranteed to have solid optimizations across the board which makes sure they run smoothly on the majority of hardware available around the time of their release. This clearly demonstrates the amount of care and sincerity they have towards their fan base.
And that’s why we won’t see a steep price tag of $100 on the upcoming GTA 6, in all probability.
GTA 6 is slated to release in fall 2025 on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. A PC version has not been announced as of yet.
