Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 executive producer and Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klíma says that he doesn’t get why GTA is so popular, but he’s hoping GTA 6’s success allows developers to raise the price of games across the board.
For the longest time, the assumption around GTA 6 was that Rockstar would be able to charge whatever it wanted for it, as people would show up thanks to the long wait and massive hype. While some were predicting the game could end up at a base price of $100, Rockstar instead opted to match the $80 mark that Nintendo introduced with Mario Kart World at the launch of the Switch 2 – which is still more than the standard, but not unprecedented.
Some developers, however, such as Wardogs lead Joe Brammer, argue that Rockstar should’ve been a trendsetter, because “games are too cheap.” Speaking to PC Gamer, Klíma hopes “GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost.” He adds that Rockstar is the only developer “who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games, which I think is long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive.”
Despite that hope, Klíma admits that the GTA series “doesn’t appeal to me at all” and that “the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It’s something which I just fail to understand.” While says he won’t “be playing GTA 6 unless I’m somehow forced to,” he’s happy to praise it, saying, “it’s really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels.”
Of course, that’s Rockstar. It and Nintendo are two of the developers with big enough fanbases that they can likely afford to charge that extra, but it doesn’t mean everyone would be suddenly willing to pay $80 for every game. Perhaps there are better ways of making the industry more sustainable, like perhaps not giving CEOs huge bonuses after laying off the devs behind the games that earned them that bonus.