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- Hacker News
- I'm surprised it won't be more.
You're telling me, you're building a product for adults who spend $1,500 or more on a PC, and you're selling your software that took a Burj Khalifa amount of effort to develop to these people for 5% of the cost of the machine they're going to run it off of?
It should probably cost closer to $180 bucks instead of $80.
by bellowsgulch - I guess the real question is its gonna be release within 2026?by cieslak
- https://www.metaculus.com/questions/40965/ gives it 71% probability.by ruuda
- They're targeting a release date of November 19th, and pre-orders were opened today.by Hugsbox
- It will be very interesting to see if this lives up to the hype and/or if it is able to recoup the enormous amount of money spent developing it. The expectations from everyone seem to be so high; it's a very long way to the bottom if it somehow flops.
Personally, things got a little too realistic for me around the time of GTA IV. The earlier games felt like cartoony fun but I started to feel bad about the stuff I was doing in IV. I tried V a year or two back (I think they've maybe remastered it since?) but it ran so terribly on the Steam Deck that I refunded it.
by jordemort - If it lives up to the hype it will definitely recoup the expense.by michaeljx
- This feels expensive, but I remember SNES games costing $60 in the 90s. If anything, the cost of videogames has been pretty resistant to inflation, I'd say?by spidercat
- I think this is a reasonable compromise. Let's face it - they could have made this a $100 game (or even more) and many people would have bought it. I would have bought it. I'm not sure if it needs to go to Neo-Geo game costs ($200+?) but Rockstar has earned enough of my trust to buy in.
That said, I think I've bought GTA5 two or three times for various platforms over the years. I doubt we'll see GTA6 on sale for years.
As they say in the automotive industry, buy once, cry once. (Pay more for the known good thing, rather than buying the cheap third party things... I'm looking at you, $30 clockspringexperts.com that I have replaced 3 times in the past 4 years... instead of buying the $300 toyota part once)
by NDizzle - They say it's $100 for the ultimate edition but really, due to how much stuff they're locking into only that edition (certain shops and stores in game), that's the base edition and the $80 one is the lite edition. It is simply a marketing trick to have a 100 dollar price tag without as much pushback.by satvikpendem
- The price seems sensible to me, these AAA titles are expensive to create.
Not that it'll affect me personally; I'm not buying this game after Rockstar's [union busting][1]!
by tao_oat - I've been seeing a lot of drama around price increases in games, but I just don't find it to be that bad. I mean, 25 years ago a new game cost $50, and now that huge open worlds are common and the playtime can be in the hundreds of hours, and adjusting for inflation, I don't think $80 is a huge ask.by overgard
- >now that huge open worlds are common and the playtime can be in the hundreds of hours
You mean those huge worlds that are mostly empty and filled with copy paste content? I take a hand crafted linear experience over open world any day. Best example is Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring.
- Some games (lots of ROM chips) cost even more in the cart era. I paid $70 for NBA Jam on SNES in 1994, which is about $160 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.
- At the same time though they have a much larger customer base to sell to. Most things get cheaper with higher sales volume. If course that is probably part of the reason why the price of games stayed similiar for so long. But it is still a good thing to keep in mind, especially with such a well known studio.by AngryData
- Over a decade of development and an estimated budget between $1-2 Billion, I am okay with paying ten bucks more. There are significantly lesser games selling for full retail.by crims0n
- I don't know, I bought RDR2 and wasted hours of progress for a launcher bug that is corrupting savegames that Rockstar very well knows about and decided to never fix. Because once you already spent for the game, who cares about the user experience after sale, right?
For me, f- them and their shitty products.
by thefz - I'm only 25 but I remember when games were $40 - $60 lol. GTA 6 is certainly worth the extra price but man I didn't realize how good we had it.by toyetic
- Its 20 bucks more not 10.
- If they sold 100 million copies at $60, that still be would be an excellent ROI on $1-2 billion.by HWR_14
- Another way to consider it is to think of it in terms of entertainment value. The average movie runtime in the US is 114 minutes or 1.9 hours, and the average movie ticket is $11.50. This means I'm paying on average ~$6.05/hr to see a movie. Taking the cost of GTA at $80, then you would only need to play for ~13.2 hours to break even compared to watching movies in the theater. But if I played 100 hours, then I paid $0.80/hr to play the game.by dessimus
- >Over a decade of development and an estimated budget between $1-2 Billion, I am okay with paying ten bucks more.
I don't balance my checkbook based on what other people spend, and presuming that those things have anything to do with perceived quality is a fools' errand with the multitude of counter examples one can bring up of AAA flops.
>lesser games
this thing isn't even out yet.
how many examples of over-produced and under-delivered expensive garbage in film, media, video games & art do we need to produce until people disconnect the two concepts of quality and cost ?
edit : I used cadre the wrong way
by serf - Some backstory - I like gaming quite a bit - but more of a personal archivalist. I have basically all games I've ever played on physical media and try to keep someway to play them offline - just jailbroke my 360 to be able to play games from HDD incase the DVD drive broke. Anyway...
I saw the no DVD and was initially devastated. I'm in two minds - I saw one post that basically said "it won't contain a DVD at launch".. if I read between the lines, though I'm not sure I see the value incentive for Rockstar, but...
If they hypothetically launched with physical boxes with digital download codes, okay... This would definitely be in the name of re-sellers (as they've stated). But this is the same as piracy, which has always been, not that "we need to stop people from pirating our games for eternity" but "we need to stop people pirates our game for X months after launch", which makes sense (the piracy party).
So, I'm wondering, if they actually begin releasing physical disks (offline, re-sellable, usable in 20 years), say, 6-12 months after releasing the game.. would that work? I mean, for me, assuming it's the equal block-buster to the franchise I adore (in a varying sense), then I might not mind too much to pick up a copy after 6-12 months (I don't care about bleeding edge).. but... would this work? If we assume the first 12M of buyers can't resell, would the people who buy the game after 12M actually bring a great number to the second hand market.. perhaps not?
I really have the idea of having games that I love in physical form that I know it can't be taken away.. similar to reading a book that you end up reading and know you want to come back to anytime in the future.. and this would _suck_ if I couldn't get a copy (and I assume all PC versions would be full of online-only DRM stuff anyway).
Ergh, I dunno
by mrmattyboy - Pirating should solve your problems pretty directly. That's basically what it is: restoring copyability of a piece of media.by dmos62
- I guess my point is.. if they were really to wait for X months and then start to release physical media (again, I can't see the financial incentive for them to do it), but it would really put a big split between: 1) people that buy that the game and simply want to re-sell it and 2) people that want to buy the game to "last forever" (like myself). Because most of the people in 1) are _likely_ to be the people wanting to buy at launch, play it and move on, the second are _probably_ more willing to wait (or even (probably) wait and buy a second copy later).by mrmattyboy
- Physical media doesn't work when modern games are 100GB or more.
And to answer your question, most consumers don't care. The convenience of being able to buy with a few clicks and download immediately without going to a store or waiting for the mail is far more beneficial to most people than being able to locally archive or replay in 20 years.
by Arainach - The highest capacity blurays available are 128GB and there's a good chance the game is larger than that, so it'd need to be a multi-disc installer.
I used to think physical media was great, but optical discs do have a finite shelf life. DRM-free is the important part, so you can make your own backups (like you're doing with your 360).
by Retr0id - Excuse my silly question, but what's the point of pre-buying a game, if it will only exists as a downloadable copy. I get you want to gift it for xmas, but for the rest of players? The point of pre-sale is to make sure you will get one when it comes out?by maxwellito
- The benefit for the player is they get a few additional in-game cosmetic unlocks, and the benefit for the publisher is they get a large wad of cash in advance and and an excuse to generate a new hype cycle surrounding the game.by teroshan
- Usually, they throw in some free content or dlc for pre-purchasing, entice people before potentially negative reviews.
- Generally it doesn't make sense, but in this particular case the servers are going ti be so overloaded with people trying to download it that it might be worth it to preloaded the game. Now of course they're probably going to have separate author servers that will probably also be overloaded with everyone trying to login at once (why does a single player game need you to log in first? good question!) so imo you're probably going to be screwed either wayby ranger207