There are many questions surrounding GTA 6. How will it feel to play? When are we getting another trailer? What's going to happen with GTA Online? But one of the most important is, how much is it going to cost? Speculation that it'll be $100 has lingered for a number of months, but a former Rockstar employee states this won't be the case.
"I think that they probably won't do that because, although they haven't said anything about it either, they will have a GTA VI online component and they'll be thinking we want the biggest user base we can possibly have," Obbe Vermeijj, previously technical director at Rockstar North, tells GameHub.
"Rather than trying to cash in that extra $30," he continues. "I think they're just going to make it a regular-priced game and then make the money on the back-end in the years to come." This is an important facet of the discussion. GTA 6 is likely to launch with whatever the next iteration of GTA Online is ready to go, and that’ll be full of microtransactions with a whole in-game economy.
Copies of the game themselves won’t be the only way Rockstar generates income. The belief it'll be $100 at retail stems from how expensive and time-consuming the development has been, spanning over a decade by this point. Blockbuster, triple-A games often find it hard to recoup all costs at current prices due to the sheer scale of making them, and Grand Theft Auto games are at the upper-most echelon of that.
Vermeijj does think GTA 6 will be a landmark in terms of development costs, and it’ll be a benchmark few others will get near. "My theory is that GTA 6 will be the most expensive game ever developed and it will remain that way because AI is going to take up a lot of the monotonous work that artists have to do," he muses.
"The main component of cost is artists. That's maybe 70% of the cost of a game," he adds. "I think more of that work will be done by AI and procedural generation, things that maybe aren't AI, but a set of rules that creates assets. Animated cutscenes as well. Motion capture for like 40-50 people for a crowd is very expensive. There's really no reason why AI couldn't do that."
That's a much bigger argument, as the use of generative AI in any shape or form is contentious within the industry. On a player level, at least, you might not need to spend any more than you typically would when GTA 6 lands on shelves, and that's the kind of pragmatic optimism I can get behind.
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