Hero image: Grand Theft Auto VI. Image: Rockstar Games, via Rockstar Games
I’ve had a GTA 6 pre-order sitting in my account since June, and I still haven’t decided how I feel about the number attached to it. Rockstar settled the question everyone spent a year arguing about — $129.95 for the standard edition, $159.95 if you want the Ultimate — and here that is five dollars over the $124.95 a flagship PS5 game already costs us, which somehow made it easier to accept instead of harder. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Let everyone spend a year imagining worse and $129.95 starts to feel like the reasonable option.
I’ve been buying games since $99.95 was the outrage. I remember the arguments when that number became $124.95, and I remember making most of them myself. Somewhere in the last five years I stopped being the person who held the line and started being the person who pre-ordered anyway, because the games kept being good enough to make the line feel abstract. Rockstar knows that about me. Rockstar knows that about most of us.
Here’s the part I actually sit with: I’m not angry that GTA 6 costs more. I’m annoyed that I don’t think it should, and I’m buying it anyway, and I’ve made my peace with being exactly the customer that pricing strategy is built around. What’s your line? Genuinely — is there a number where you’d have walked, or were you always going to be here in November regardless of what it said on the box?
Five dollars isn’t the part that worries me. What worries me is next November, when some other publisher looks at how little Rockstar’s price actually cost them in pre-orders and decides their game is worth the same jump. GTA 6 didn’t have to prove we would pay $129.95 — it only had to prove we would still show up, and pre-orders opening on schedule back in June already answered that.
So I’ll be there on the nineteenth, controller in hand, having spent forty minutes writing about why that bothers me and not one minute seriously considering not doing it. I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite. I think it just means I already know exactly what kind of gamer I am, and $129.95 was never going to be the thing that changed it.
Source: Press Start, Stevivor, TechRadar