Rockstar’s GTA 6 is priced at $80 for its standard edition. Another voice has come forward to say they hope other teams follow suit and charge more for new games to help the industry at a time when developers are closing up shop, cancelling games, and laying off developers on a regular basis.
Martin Klima, the co-founder of Kingdom Come developer Warhorse, told PC Gamer that raising unit prices would “help a lot,” but “everybody’s scared to death” to do it.
“Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost,” he said, adding that Rockstar and Take-Two are among the only companies who can “afford, or who can dare” to raise prices in this way.
He added that price increases for new games are “long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive.”
Take-Two was among the first big publishers to drive prices up from $60 to $70, kicking this off with NBA 2K21 in 2020. Numerous other publishers followed suit, and now $70 is the norm. Defending the price increase, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick said production costs increased by 300%.
Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden said in 2025 that the price of new games should have gone up with every new console generation for the past 20 years. That largely did not happen, and now the industry is worse off for it, he said.
“I think it’s because everyone’s afraid,” he told GI.biz. “No one wants to be the first one to raise the price, because you’re afraid to lose traffic. So what you do is you just end up eating into your operating income, your profit margin.”
“There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era, because if you’re selling 20 million units at $60 for something that only cost you $10 million to make, that’s different than selling 20 million units at $60 for something that cost you $160 million to make.”
To help make up the difference, developers have hawked things like microtransactions, DLC, and battle passes. If more games go up in price, those trends will likely continue, too.
Before GTA 6’s price was revealed, a Bank of America stock analyst said Take-Two should charge $80 to help spur other publishers to follow suit.
We already have $80 games, as Nintendo charges $80 for Mario Kart World, saying the game’s ambition justifies the price tag.
Every game is priced differently, even within the same publisher, as Take-Two launched Mafia: The Old Country for $50–to great success. For its part, Nintendo’s newly released Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave costs $80 for its physical edition or $70 for its digital counterpart.
GTA 6, which releases on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, also has a $100 Ultimate Edition and a $400 collector’s edition that does not include the game. Zelnick said earlier this year that Rockstar could have leveraged the monumental demand for GTA 6 to charge a higher price to consumers, but chose not to.
In addition to the mountains of money Rockstar and Take-Two are due to make off GTA 6 game sales, the game is likely to eventually have some kind of new version of GTA Online, and that’s no doubt going to print money.
