Sure, you've probably considered the effect that paying $80 or more for GTA 6 would have on your own wallet, but have you ever stopped to consider the poor, struggling game industry? The multi-billion dollar publishers that make AAA games can't justify raising their own prices if a megalith like GTA 6 sticks to the old model, and Take-Two should really just do the rest of the industry a solid and open the $80 floodgates.
At least, that's the argument made by Bank of America analyst Omar Dessouky after attending the iicon conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. His team "heard from attendees that the industry, which is perceived as struggling, would have difficulty selling games for $80 if GTA 6 came out at $70," according to a note published on Seeking Alpha (thanks, VGC). "We think it’s in Take-Two's self-interest, as a publisher and partner to many developers, to raise the price point for the entire industry."
Will players be willing to accept higher prices? Of course they will, Dessouky and his team assert, because AI is making games more valuable to players. Never mind the fact that Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has asserted that there's no AI involved in GTA 6 at all, nor the fact that players have had a pretty negative response every time they've been confronted with AI-generated content.
Part of why Dessouky believes that GTA 6 should be $80 is because of Zelnick's assertion during the conference that the game would be priced in accordance with its value to consumers. Which, uh, was not what Zelnick said – at least not in public. Instead, the CEO insisted that the company aimed to "charge way way way less of the value" players get out of its games.
It is true, at least, that video games are actually cheaper than ever when accounting for inflation, but that ignores the broader economic crunch cutting the amount of cash people are willing to spend on entertainment, never mind the increasing cost of entry to gaming as a hobby.
GTA 6 is expected to be a system seller, but with PS5 prices north of $600 it's easy to imagine prospective Grand Theft Auto players looking at all these rapidly spiking price tags and saying "no thanks." I'm not sure AI can generate an answer to that problem.
