I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven't started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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And it's an impossible equation for most Americans to pay more. Especially if things continue to downward spiral.
Where's my eye patch?
We can't make less money! I promised Susan a new yacht^[Obviously with two heliports, olympic swimming pool, on-board beer brewery, bowling alley, crew of 20, escort yacht for utilities - just the bare necessities, nothing fancy.] for her name day!
Meanwhile I'm still enjoying Schedule I, which is made by a single dev and has "low quality" graphics by choice. We don't need AAA games left and right; we need good, fun ones with strong foundations. Games that don't demand paid DLC, or season passes, or fucking Shark Cards.
I truly understand that Rockstar is under a lot of pressure as the creator/publisher of GTA. But not every company/developer needs to be like them.
According to SEC filings, Take Two Interactive studio made 2.241 Billion USD profit in 2024.
Did they release anything of note in 2024? Presumably the annual slog2k sports.
Yes, in fact the report specifically mentions that NBA 2k24 outperformed expectations. Other than that they're probably earning passively off of older titles and GTA V microtransactions.
Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?
Maybe stop spending nigh decades and nigh billions of dollars designing these enormous catch all games that are supposed to appeal to everyone?
I Don't want to spend 90 dollars on a game that has 400 different things to do, 200 of which I enjoy.
I'd rather give Sandfall 50 bucks for a lovingly crafted, focused game that's actually, you know, good.
If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.
Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.
Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!
I've been saying it for the last decade, there's no real "games are too expensive to make" problem. There's only studios choosing the "go big or go home" death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they're going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it's not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.
But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they've been at it since at least mid 2000s. It's only in the recent years where it's really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They're feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.
Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let's get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.
on top of all that; big money, be it profits or revenue, attracts parasites that start ruining the company from the inside. One can feel it on many games that developers wanted to do good but were prevented from doing so because of executives and middle management.
Not only that, they produced a game with no major flaws with a tiny (comparable to these mega studios) team AND NO COMPROMISES.
“Man, this game is great but the music is meh” - not at Sandfall.
“Wow, I love the combat but the graphics are dated” - nope, every model is so lovingly crafted they added haircuts and outfits as secret loot
“The combat is the only weak point in this gorgeous, story driven game” not on expedition 33 it ain’t!
It seems like there’s a few studios that get this trick. Hazelight (Split Fiction, It Takes Two) seems to have a good cadence to releases and likely hasn’t inflated their size all that much. They’re consistently making good games.
I wish there were more examples of that.
The company made over 5 billion revenue and spent over 2 billion cost of operating in 2024, I don't think this has anything to do with affordability.
Not sure I follow sir/ma'am - are you saying R* doesn’t have to price it at 90$ and they’ll still make money?
I mean that’s true, but publicly traded companies are the devil themselves and are required to make as much money as possible.
Came here to say this. Stop trying the build the whole universe in a game.
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GTA 6 is just going to be client app to a universe of micro transactions. They should probably just give it away free.
I don't even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
Lmao who would believe that gta 6 is not going to make an absolute bank? They could give it away for free and still make more money that they could spend.
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
How about buying only one or two dolls for their kids?
People expect games that are ever more ambitious
Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn't have anything to do with ambition.
People praise expedition 33, that game might as well be an xbox 360 game and it people would still absolutely love it.
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He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they'll get £0. I'll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I'm sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
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That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.
NBA 2K24 also outperformed expectations.
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