For the past few weeks, there have been whisperings flitting amongst the gaming world that Grand Theft Auto VI will do the unthinkable and cost $100 USD for the standard edition. Before we get into the feasability of such an idea, it’s worth noting this rumor has zero basis in fact, and Rockstar Games has said and done nothing to indicate this could be the case. The discussion topic sprang up because during a presentation on the State of Gaming in 2025, industry analyst Matthew Ball says that “some gamemakers hope GTA VI will be priced at $80 to $100, breaking the $70 barrier and helping $50 titles to move up to $60, $60 to do $70, $70 to $80 etc.” Hope being the key word.
He goes on to say that, “Packaged game prices have never been lower in real terms than they are today — even though budgets are at all-time highs and player growth is stalled. GTA VI could re-establish packed video game prices after decades of deflation despite rampant cost growth.” While some bits of this statement make sense, others are coming from a place of misunderstanding how macroeconomics work in practice vs in models. Charging players more money for premium games and flooding them with microtransactions (MTX) may work for the unkillable titan that is Grand Theft Auto, but from both an ethical and economic standpoint is the worst possible move the industry could make.
It is no secret to anyone that the AAA gaming industry is collapsing. It is also no secret that it is going out with a whimper, not a bang. Worldwide, there were around 10,500 layoffs of game developers in 2023, followed by a whopping 14,600 jobs lost in 2024. Data from the International Game Developers Association suggests that as much as up to 9% of the video game developers in the US are currently unemployed, more than twice the 4.1% national average. GamesIndustry.biz counts over two dozen game studios, both AAA and indie, that were shuttered in 2024. Xbox alone laid off 2,600 developers alone last year, shuttering 4 studios including Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, and driving me to the brink of insanity. As I am typing this, Dragon Age: The Veilguard studio BioWare has laid off all of its key developers from the Dragon Age team; there is no indication that 2025 will be any different.
Indie games have long been touted as a solution to the collapse of the industry, but the truth is a lot more complicated and a lot less hopeful than social media makes it out to be. For every Undertale, or Stardew Valley, or Celeste, there are literally one thousand games that launch, sell a double digit number of copies, and then disappear forever. Did you know 19,000 games released on Steam just in 2024? Yes, most of them are hentai puzzle games, but they are still video games for the purposes of this discussion. And frankly, there’s no point even making a distinction in how good these games are – if you don’t have the money for good marketing, your scrappy little team could easily produce something of Hollow Knight quality without more than a few dozen people ever becoming aware it exists.
According to GDC, around 32% of all game developers are working for indie studios. Now, there are a good few indie games that are made for relatively small amounts, and therefore require fewer sales to recoup costs and turn a profit. Undertale, largely the work of a single man, cost around $50,000 to produce and went on to become one of the biggest indie games of all time. On average though, you’ll see indie game budgets coming in between $500,000 and $1 million. Weigh this against the fact that VGInsights found that 43% of all indie games on Steam have sold less than 300 units, and you’ll start to see where I’m going with this. You dedicate seven years of your life and a dozen people to your vision, you make it happen against all odds, secure the funding, release it, do everything you can on social media, and no one ever hears about it. With 19,000 games coming out a year, about 18,900 of them will be commercial failures, and 8,000 of them will sell less than 300 copies.
Indie studios are shutting down, too, and also experience mass layoffs. In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, indie developer Aurélien Condomines said of this phenomenon, “There’s a problem with the offering of the markets, and there is also a problem with pricing because a lot of developers are ready to underprice their games,” he explains. “When you combine that with financing [issues], you have a real squeezing effect which in the long term… I mean, you can already see it. Studios closing and people not being able to make a living out of game development.”
His partner, Mélanie Christin, added “It’s really hard to stand out and show your game to the right eyes. There are people that would be interested in your game, but they just can’t see it because there are so many other good games around. It really comes down to marketing, but even in marketing, things change so fast that it’s hard to know how to reach your audience.” Condomines then hits the nail on the head: “And the audience has a lot of choice. Even as a gamer, you have so many choices that in the end, you don’t know what to choose, so you keep playing the same old stuff.”
Comdomines’ point is the truth that a lot of publishers realized years ago; the vast majority of players are not interested in new games. Think for a moment about the fact that you have to badger your friends for months on end to watch literal modern masterpieces of television like Severance or Shogun. They’ll “get to it eventually.” It’s “on the list.” The reason they aren’t watching these new shows is because they are watching The Office or Friends for the literal 14th time. I’m at fault too here! I’ve watched Avatar: The Last Airbender upwards of 30 times. The point is that even without the media creators trying, people tend to latch on to their favorite things.
Now add to the equation that so, so many huge games are made to be played forever. These are called live service games, or games as a service (GAAS), and are designed to be played every day of your life, often offering rewards for logging in daily and completing objectives. First reported by Kotaku, data from Newzoo found that 60% of all games that were played in 2023 were seven years old or older, across PC and all consoles. Not a single new game made it into the top 10 games on the PC list, while only giants like Starfield and Hogwarts Legacy made it into the console lists. With thousands of new games to play each year, the majority of players are still spending most of their time on Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, and ole reliable GTA V. Imagine if The Office was getting feature updates, new story expansions, and new skins for Dwight every year! But I digress.
As one of the only new games to make a dent in player time in 2023, let’s look at Starfield. While I loved it, it received middling reviews from fans and was unable to find the lasting audience Bethesda’s other titles have. Even as a fan of their massive space RPG, I find myself going back to Fallout 4 instead, a thing I have already done for 1,100 hours. Starfield boasted a massive 330k concurrent Steam players at launch, fell below 20k in a matter of weeks, and is now down to 4.7k. Meanwhile, the Skyrim Special Edition remaster from 2016 peaked at 70k players and is still at 60k right at this very moment; Fallout 4 is similar, managing to reach 187k concurrent players last year, 9 years after release. Hell, the original edition of Skyrim from 2011 is still being played by 2.5k people RIGHT NOW.
While we’re discussing Steam, it thankfully pulls together data on what kind of time players are spending on new vs. old games that will further illustrate my point. With 132 million monthly active users (MAU), Steam is a good indicator of what gamers as a whole are up to. Only 15% of total player time on Steam in 2024 was spent on games that were released in 2024; this is actually higher than the 9% they spent on new games in 2023! PC gamers spent 47% of their time on games 1-7 years old, and 37% of their time on games 8 years old or older.
Valve (Steam’s parent company) also revealed top 10 played games in 2024. A few new breakout live service games like Helldivers 2 and Palworld made the list, but were surrounded by old games such as Hades (2020), Fallout 4 (2015), GTA V (2013), Stardew Valley (2015), and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). When we move to talk about top earners of 2024, including MTX, DLC, and premium revenue in those numbers, Steam lists PUBG (2016), Destiny 2 (2017), Dota 2 (2013), and Apex Legends (2019).
Back to the topic of game pricing; for our foreign readers, the current standard for full price premium games is $70 USD, up from the $60 standard we all enjoyed from 2005-2020. That $70 USD is the equivalent of £56.40, €67.32, $101.10 CAD, or $112.68 AUD. I feel absolutely confident that if $100 were to become the new standard for premium games, there would be no way for the industry to ever recover. The last thing a dying industry needs is a Mortal Kombat Fatality to the spine.
So first, let’s talk about Ball’s assertion about inflation. First, it is true: it is completely artificial that the price of games stayed at $60 for 15 years. The free market would not have let that happen. The first game to switch from $60 to $70 pricing was NBA 2k21 in August of 2020, and within the next two years all major publishers followed suit. $1 in 2005, when the industry standardized game prices, was worth $1.33 in 2020, and is worth $1.62 now in 2025. If games prices were to rise with inflation we’d have been looking at $79 games in 2020 and $97 games now. There is, however, literally no reason game prices have to rise with inflation.
Before we even speak about wages, it should be noted that the prices of other products have risen with inflation incrementally. Since we’re talking games, let’s stick to entertainment. Movie tickets in the US rose from an average price of $6.21 in 2004 to $10.78 in 2024. Although the numbers don’t appear huge, that is a staggering 68% increase. Inflation rose 66% during the same time period, loosely matching the rising prices. The movie theater industry is in dire straits at the moment, raking in $11.89 billion in 2019 and struggling to reach a post-COVID high of $8.91 billion in 2023 before dropping again in 2024.
Ball is correct in saying that AAA game budgets are at an all-time high; back in 2011, Skyrim‘s budget (including marketing) reached a monumental $100 million. In 2013, Grand Theft Auto V cost $200 million. The Last of Us Part II took around $220 million in 2020 to produce and market, and finally Starfield in 2023 costing as astronomical $400 million to get out the door. There are also AAA studios that have produced critical and commercial monster hits with (relatively) small budgets, such as The Witcher 3 costing $85 million in 2015, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at $120 million in 2017, or Elden Ring costing a paltry $110 million in 2022. I am by no means an expert on how dollars should be spent and allotted for game development, but much like movie budgets, I can see that capitalism is catching up. Each game must be subsequently bigger and better than the one before. Infinite growth is unsustainable growth.
The Law of Demand states that consumers will pay as much as they are willing to pay for a product; while this seems like a redundancy, it’s important to remember because it means there is a cap on prices that can be raised before consumers decide not to spend. We’ve seen this happen in real time with entertainment more than once; for instance, Netflix raising its prices for its ad-free tier from $10.99 a month to $14.99 caused a huge number of subscribers not to quit paying for the service, but to pay for the cheaper ad tier at $6.99 instead. If those consumers truly have a demand ceiling of $11 a month, they will not pay more than that for Netflix. It also doesn’t mean they stop watching Netflix, so long as a cheaper alternative is available.
A study published in November 2024 found that there are around 2.58 billion gamers in the world, being defined as people who actively play video games every month. Newzoo keeps track of MAU for PC games worldwide, and the top played games in terms of users in December 2024 are as follows: Fortnite (2017), Counterstrike 2 (a free update of a 2012 game), Minecraft (2010), Marvel Rivals (2024), Roblox (2006), The Sims 4 (2014), and League of Legends (2010). Every one of these are live service games. And yet, I’m guilty of this myself! My two most played games on PC in 2024 were both live service games, Fallout 76 from 2018 and Overwatch 2, and update of a 2016 game. No one is immune!
Bethesda’s breakout single-player hit that released in December, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, doesn’t even place in the top 20. Game of the Year contender Metaphor ReFantazio from the massively successful Persona franchise is nowhere to be seen. The best selling non-live service game of 2024 was freaking Elden Ring, a game from February 2022. My point should be clear; a very small percentage of those 2.58 billion people will pay $60-70 for a premium one-time purchase when there are dozens of (admittedly sometimes excellent) games with millions of players that they can experience for free. Rational consumers will not bite the bullet and pay more for your premium games; they will simply play something else for free.
The argument that only a certain type of game is available as live-service, and that gamers are trapping themselves in one genre is holding less water each year. Chinese Developer MiHoyo has launched three massively successful premium-level games in the last 5 years – Genshin Impact, Zoneless Zen Zero, and Honkai Star Rail, all for $0 up front. Each of these games features gacha (gambling) mechanics done with real-world money for in-game unlockables such as characters, weapons, and costumes. These games have generated billions of dollars in revenue for MiHoyo, and many studios that have always done things a certain way have begun to look hungrily at their earnings. It’s also become harder to convince those who haven’t tried a non-live service RPG like Unicorn Overlord or Like a Dragon that these critically acclaimed and wildly beloved titles are worth their time to explore if it means they have to put down their forever game.
Millennials and Gen X gamers are carrying the bulk of the load keeping non-live service games in business. So what about the considerable chunk of gamers that are Gen Z? In 2025, this generation is basically everyone from ages 12 to 26. You know which group has a driving need to keep up on the latest trends to fit in, a way to be actively social online, a need for entertainment they can control, and exactly $0 in cash? It’s no surprise that this generation is so stuck in Fortnite and Minecraft – I imagine, for a moment, that I’m a kid again. It’s 2001. It would have been way, way easier to get my mom to hand me $10 to play a month of Fortnite with the premium battle pass than to give me $50 so I could get all-time great Luigi’s Mansion and beat it 5 hours later.
You can obviously argue that these live-service games are worse experiences than many premium games, and in fact are stopping gamers actively from experiencing entire genres like city-builders, metroidvanias, platformers, etc. I’d say that MiHoyo’s suite of games spanning an open world action RPG, a turn-based classic JRPG, and a roguelike action game prove that anything genre can become live service and free-to-play. Will they be better, or even good in this format? Almost certainly not. But that doesn’t matter to most consumers, because it is free unless they choose to later spend money in-game. Think about my Netflix example – people will opt for the worse experience if it is cheaper, and considering the state of the worldwide economy how can I blame them?
If premium games, or the gaming industry as a whole is to survive, games must cost less to purchase. The only way this is achievable in a sustainable way is if they also cost much less to produce. Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s 1.5 million sales in its first month should not be rewarded with firing key personnel and scattering the team to work on Battlefield. Spider-Man 2′s $315 million budget cannot be allowed to be the new normal. The 15 studios simultaneously working on Assassin’s Creed Shadows right now across as many countries cannot be a requirement to make a video game. With how poorly game budgets, scopes, and team sizes are managed, it is a literal miracle premium games don’t already cost $150 apiece. In a world where selling a million of ANY entertainment product is a commercial failure, we have to face the truth: we have completely lost the plot.
As time inches forward, and capitalism forces this $250 billion industry to eat itself, the literal only thing we as consumers can do is watch. Because that is how the machine works. We are long, long past the point of voting with our wallets – it has never once made a difference in the video game industry. Time marches on, and even the decreasing cost of production seen in Moore’s Law doesn’t offset the demanded profit margins from middle management in these game studios, draining resources from the artists making the games. I don’t foresee anything other than slow disaster in the future for this industry if things keep going the same way; we have to hope that it isn’t too late for the folks in charge to realize that art cannot be forced to follow the whims of a market broken by late-stage capitalism. It will make everything worse for everyone, and it already has.
Game studios must be allowed to commercially fail once or twice without costing the livelihoods of hundreds of developers and their families. The only way that can happen is if this industry can look the maw of capitalism in the face, demanding infinite growth in scope and profits, and say “no.” Sacrifice scope for quality. Sacrifice quarterly profits for long-term customer loyalty. Sacrifice monthly operating cost for employee happiness. In the meantime, raising premium game prices and setting even more unrealistic expectations for sales units is the fastest and surest way to collectively sentence our favorite hobby to extinction.