Shit Is Just Expensive Now.

 

(The original version of this blog post was written on June 25th, 2026. In an effort to preserve the original sentiment, it was published as it was written. However, an addendum has been added at the end, regarding the recent discussion about whether or not a game similar in scope and size to Insomniac's Wolverine can demand a $70 launch MSRP).

This is a boring one, so I’ll try and keep it short.

Rockstar Games’ long awaited Grand Theft Auto VI will launch on November 17th for a base price of $80, with an Ultimate Edition priced at $100. 

Many players expected as much, some even theorized that the title’s base sticker price would be $100, so $80 is far from “surprising”. That being said, there is reasonable disgruntlement among potential buyers, due to what actually separates these two editions. GTA VI will be released as a single player experience, while its Ultimate upgrade will include 5 additional stores, multiple cosmetics, and two story missions. The idea is that content that is already in the game is being paywalled at launch. While this is undoubtedly true, I personally cannot help but feel like this is functionally similar in content scope to an expansion pass, but delivered through a launch-tier pricing structure instead of post-launch DLC, which, in and of itself is debatably predatory through the right lens.

A good example is Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty Expansion: a $30 expansion that paywalls: New endings for the game, the Dog Town area, multiple vendors and cosmetics, vehicle contracts and airdrops, level cap increases, a new skill tree under the Relic node, among other additions. For $30, this is an incredible value for money, vastly more so than GTA VI’s Ultimate Edition perks; but it is also effectively paywalling narrative endings, replayable gameplay, and character build functionality. The difference is less the reality of the walled content than release packaging: expansion vs edition split.

So, GTA VI is expensive, potentially needlessly so in an industry that’s patrons are historically elastic outside of few exceptions in the way of annual Call of Duty titles or Sports games, which command a returning player base year after year, despite being infamously mediocre and iterative. But this shouldn’t be surprising.

GTA VI may be the first traditional AAA release whose commercial expectations are so enormous that its development budget effectively operates without a conventional ceiling. And it's $80, with an additional $20 for what effectively boils down to a bundle of cosmetics and two extra story missions. We’ve seen this time and time again with Ubisoft, Activision, and other AAA developers: you are being paywalled for extra content by a company that has spent the last 13 years becoming ubiquitous with the concept of nickel and diming its player base, lest we forget that GTA5 has re-released on more occasions than The Last of Us 2 has. This is not to justify the practice, but it is to put the package’s worst offense into context. 

I’d go over the discussion about digital codes being put into boxes, but it does seem like GTA VI will eventually be getting physical discs sometime after launch. There are a multitude of reasons as to why the title won’t be launching with a physical edition, among them are concerns about leaks, the cost economics of manufacturing blu-ray discs when we’re dealing in tens of millions of units, ensuring that the gold master has day 0 patches baked onto the disc, as well as more sinister reasons such as double-dipping revenue, or eliminating a used games market after launch.

To reiterate, I am not saying “$80 is fine actually and the Ultimate edition is fine too”, I am offering some perspective in a world that continues to cannibalize itself by reactionism.

With GTA VI specifically out of the way, what I really want to dive into is the economics of entertainment media over time (like I said, this is a boring one). When we look at video games, it is quite possibly the most consumer friendly industry in the world. During the 6th console generation, AAA titles would float around the $50 mark, during the 7th and 8th generations, that same pedigree of title held to $60s, when the 9th generation launched, it moved to $70 where it is now, with the exception of two titles in Mario Kart World and GTA VI, which are $80.

Over the last 25 years, AAA game pricing has increased by roughly 40–60%, depending on the baseline price used, moving from the $50 standard of the early 2000s to the $70–$80 range today.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data (https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/big-games-big-prices-admissions-for-sporting-events-up-123-percent-since-2000.htm), entertainment-related categories have not moved uniformly:

Admission to movies, theaters, and concerts has increased by roughly ~100% since 2000

Sporting event admissions have increased by roughly ~120%

The broader “recreation” category (which includes games, hobbies, toys, and media consumption) has increased by roughly ~35–40%

The overall entertainment basket averages out to significantly higher than games alone, driven primarily by live event pricing

Using that category as a rough inflation benchmark, a $50 game in 2000 would be around $68.50 today, or $70, which is where it is now largely for the AAA space. If we go by the highest price changes (123% or 105%), a AAA title would be $103-$112. Lastly, if we go by the average price change of all entertainment items, a game that was $50 in 2000 would be $94 today. 

This is to say nothing of the extraordinary inflation of game development budgets as AAA studios strive to push technological boundaries in the face of technological stagnation. As generations pass, the average player still wants to be convinced to buy a new console or new graphics card with increasingly demanding technology; AAA studios that live and die on pushing the envelope are cannibalizing themselves to meet or exceed the expectations of players who just want something that looks new, or shiny; which I imagine accounts for a vastly larger portion of “gamers” than those who are satisfied with lower-budget, manicured experiences (see: the sales of any annual release, or any “this looks like a PS3 game” comment).

Unfortunately, we come to the conclusion that, over the last 26 years, the video games industry has actually been lagging behind the inflation curve of every other sector in entertainment, in some cases; drastically. For the medium known notoriously for being “the expensive hobby”, it’s actually been relatively affordable over the last 3 decades. What this suggests is an industry that has historically absorbed inflation differently than other entertainment sectors. Games have remained unusually price-stable relative to both production complexity and broader entertainment inflation, which is why recent increases feel more abrupt than they are structurally new, this is especially due to the fact that players are uniquely price-sensitive and frequently vote with their wallets.

Of course, there is the very valid argument that predatory companies are predatory, and are always maximizing profits and therefore are inherently taking advantage of their player base regardless, which is true. For example, if we compare apples to apples, $30 for Phantom Liberty is much prettier than $20 for GTA VI’s “Ultimate Edition”.

Side note, “Ultimate” is defined as the "maximum possible limit” of any given thing by Merriam Webster, and yet something tells me that that $20 goodie pack is nowhere near “the maximum possible limit” and that the “limit” is actually going to come after release in the form of micro-transaction hell. Just a hunch. Prepare to get even more fucked.

Second side note, on the off chance that some big shot manages to find their way to this, don’t get any ideas, you do not get to make your next game $112 because people can’t afford to go to concerts, this is not implied consent to take advantage of players, $70 was enough, $80 is pushing it; even for titles that might “warrant” that sticker price.

The industry is buckling, we covered as much recently, GTA VI may very well be the last “successful” game of its size as belts tighten and sectors of the global economy collapse under the weight of several bubbles. GTA VI will succeed, even if it releases as a buggy mess, another apt comparison to Cyberpunk is in order. GTA VI will go on to gross billions of dollars over the next decade, it will go on to win numerous awards. Take Two will go on to shutter studios and throw developers to a figurative (or real, who knows at this point) guillotine. While all of this is true and devastating, one thing is also true:

In context, Grand Theft Auto VI releasing at $80 is, unfortunately, exactly where economics said it was going to be years ago.

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Good Morning, it is Friday.

This week we saw the release of Insomniac's Wolverine. I'm still making my own way through the game's main campaign and should theoretically be wrapping it up tonight, before spending my weekend cleaning up for its Platinum Trophy. It's safe to say that the game has not landed as well with other players, with reviews ranging between "disappointing" and "satisfactory", a true 7.

This additional section is not here to discuss whether or not people like the game, we have reviews for that, along with tireless moaning on social media that's seemingly become a tradition for video game releases at this point. It's here to discuss the fact that $70 might actually be a "budget price" for games.

Above I wrote about how the average price for a AAA title should, mathematically, be in the $70 range, but increasing market elasticity has made people question what they're actually paying for. This is fine to do, encouraged, even. If you don't think Wolverine is worth $70, don't buy it for $70. Wait for a sale, buy it used, play it through a subscription service, or simply don't play it. Consumers have every right to look at a price tag and decide that the product isn't worth that price to them. That is how a market is supposed to work.

But there is a distinction between saying "$70 is too much for me to pay for this game" and saying "$70 is an economically unreasonable price for this game." The former is entirely subjective and completely valid. The latter requires us to actually look at what it costs to make a AAA video game in 2026.

I didn't even cover the absolutely absurd curve of production budgets over the last 20 years. It seems like every AAA title costs more than $200 million, and while there certainly are exceptions, I don't imagine that trend to slow down any time soon. Development teams are larger, development cycles are longer, marketing budgets are enormous, and the expectations placed on these games have grown accordingly. A twenty-hour game can cost just as much, or more, to produce than a fifty-hour game. Development costs don't scale neatly with the number of hours a player spends in the finished product.

Twenty hours of content was not historically incompatible with a $50 MSRP. Plenty of full-priced games  around the turn of the millennium (like 20-hour Deus Ex) could be completed in roughly twenty hours, and nobody treated MSRP as a function of hours played. The $50 price tag bought the product, not an allotted number of hours.

And this is where I think the discussion around Wolverine gets particularly interesting. $70 is a lot of money. It is entirely reasonable to look at a $70 price tag and decide that twenty hours of entertainment isn't worth that much to you. But the fact that the game is twenty hours long doesn't tell us very much about whether $70 is an unreasonable price for the people who actually had to make the thing.

The consumer and the publisher are looking at entirely different sides of the same transaction. A consumer is asking, "How much entertainment am I getting for my $70?" A publisher is asking, "How much money do we need to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in development and marketing costs?" Neither question is inherently wrong, and they don't necessarily arrive at the same answer.

There is another wrinkle here that makes Wolverine's $70 price tag particularly interesting when compared to something like Grand Theft Auto VI.

Wolverine is, fundamentally, a premium single-player product. You buy the game and, outside of whatever future expansions or additional products may exist, that initial purchase represents most of the revenue Insomniac and Sony can expect from you. GTA VI is different. Rockstar can sell you the base game, a more expensive edition, expansions, additional content and whatever the eventual GTA Online economy looks like. If GTA VI follows the commercial model of its predecessor, the initial $80 purchase is only the beginning of the relationship between Rockstar and its players.

The sticker price isn't the entire economic picture in this case and it's incredibly important to understand that.

Rockstar has the ability to spread the cost of developing GTA VI across an enormous post-launch ecosystem that Wolverine simply does not have. The base game can function as the entry point to a product that will continue generating revenue for years. A single-player game like Wolverine has considerably fewer opportunities to do that.

In that sense, GTA VI's $80 price may actually be cheaper than it otherwise could be. Rockstar doesn't necessarily need to recover the entire cost of GTA VI through the initial sale because it has every reason to expect additional revenue from the people who buy it. Wolverine doesn't have that same safety net.

This is not an argument that Wolverine should cost $70, nor is it an argument that anyone should be happy to pay $70. A game can be reasonably priced from the perspective of the company making it and still be too expensive for the person standing in front of the register (err, digital storefront?). Both things can be true at the same time.

Consumers are not wrong for demanding better prices, questioning AAA budgets, refusing to buy games at launch, or looking at twenty hours of content and deciding that $70 isn't worth it. Publishers are going to charge $70 when they believe the market will tolerate it, and when that price makes sense against the economics of producing and selling the game.

The uncomfortable reality is that the two sides have spent years moving in opposite directions. Consumers have become accustomed to increasingly enormous games while expecting the sticker price to remain relatively stable. Publishers responded by finding increasingly elaborate ways to monetize players after the initial purchase. Now the industry is reaching the point where even the upfront price is beginning to move.

$70 is steep. It should be criticized. It should be scrutinized. And if enough people decide that it is too expensive, the market will eventually have something to say about that, and publishers will respond accordingly, whether that means cutting costs, reducing scope, adding monetization, or finding somewhere else to make up the difference.. 

That distinction is becoming increasingly important as AAA games continue getting more expensive to make, while the people buying them have spent the better part of three decades expecting the price on the box to stay the same. 

There was a moment in time following the Insomniac leak that led people to think Wolverine would be outright cancelled due to the degree in which it jeopardized the studio. It is not illogical to assume that that would've had a domino effect on quality, scope, and/or scale of the final product, further exacerbating the "What the fuck am I paying for?" of it all. 

Unfortunately, $70 is now just the price for your run-of-the-mill "this is the new one" game. If I had to list every game that released with substandard quality at full MSRP we'd be here all day. If I had to list every game that was shorter than RDR2's platinum, but had the same MSRP, we'd be here all of tomorrow. GTA VI will vastly out-earn its average spend-per-consumer, as they'll sell console players a next-gen upgrade, and another one after that if we're all still alive to see the 11th console generation. It may go on sale, but those shark cards will be purchased regardless to further exploit the player base. GTA V was not only the most successful game of all time, it was by and large one of the most profitable games in history, and that profit didn't come from people paying $60 one time in 2013. 

I fear the conclusion isn't that Wolverine is economically unprecedented at $70, it's that GTA VI's $80 or $100 MSRP is a trojan horse for monetization schemes you probably didn't even think were possible, but nonetheless schemes that allow that base price to undercut economic projections by as much as it does. Rockstar doesn't have to make the maximum amount of money possible from the initial sale of GTA VI because the initial sale gives it access to the far more lucrative part of the business: the player's lifetime value.