Grand Theft Auto VI will be the biggest release of the decade, if/when it arrives later in 2025. But at time of writing, with no release date and very few official details about the game, there are a lot of unanswered questions, namely, how much the game will cost at launch.
Which usually isn’t a sticking point, but the weight that GTA VI carries cannot be understated, and now another analyst has presented claims that Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two could be priced at $100 for the base game.
Before you start to worry though, these claims come from Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, an analyst who just three years ago claimed that PlayStation was “doomed” within this decade, and going back a bit further, went as far as to say “I don’t know why [Satoru] Iwata is still employed” when Nintendo was in the throws of its poor performing Wii U-era.
Of course at the time it was easy, and popular, to call out Nintendo’s Wii U as a poor choice, but it requires a certain kind of tunnel vision to try and call out one of the industry’s best leaders, and ignore the business culture within which Nintendo operates. It was also only a few short years after Pachter’s words that Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch, and we all know how that went.
This time, Pachter’s claim comes from the idea that Rockstar would package the GTA Online experience with the base game of GTA VI, and use the fact that GTA Online is purchasable as a separate entity from GTA V currently to bump up the price of GTA VI. Also, Pachter believes Rockstar would include a good amount of GTA Online’s premium currency to also bolster the price of the base game.
“We think the company has plans to sell the game at a previously unheard of price point, and suspect that management can offer consumers an incentive to pay $100 or more per unity by rewarding them with a large amount of in-game currency to be spent in GTA Online.
There is precedent for integrating an online game experience with a premium game, as Activision did so with both Call of Duty Warzone and Call of Duty Mobile content prior to the release of its annual Call of Duty premium installment.
In Activision’s case, the integration led to a 40% increase in sales of Call of Duty premium; in Take-Two’s case, we think a successful integration of GTA Online and GTA VI can lead to a $100 price point for the premium game.”
Patcher’s claims about GTA VI being priced at $100 isn’t anything new. We previously heard from analyst Matthew Ball that there was “hope” across the games industry, that GTA VI would be priced at $100 to raise the price of AAA games across the board.
Other analysts however, including Rhys Eilliot of MiDiA have called these claims “ridiculous,” noting that “There’s no need to make the base price of any game $100. Special editions, collector’s editions, gold/silver editions, etc, do the same thing, and a high percentage of day-one buyers jump on those at their elevated price points. There’s just no need.”
As Eilliot points out, it’s more likely that GTA VI will cost $100 through some kind of deluxe edition, while the base game will remain at the new standard of $70 USD for AAA games.
Until Rockstar finally comes out and confirms the price, though, we’ve not much to do beyond wait with baited breath, and hope we’re not all forced to shell out an extra $30 USD just to play the campaign in GTA VI.
Source – [VGC]
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