Rockstar Games' $80 price for Grand Theft Auto 6 is to keep Grand Theft Auto Online's player base and Shark Card spending growing for years, not to reward developers, as this analyst suggests they should do.
Ben Thompson, the tech and business analyst behind Stratechery, went on the TBPN podcast and argued that Rockstar Games is charging far too little for Grand Theft Auto VI. He called the next Grand Theft Auto the last great game, the pinnacle of AAA craftsmanship made almost entirely before AI tools reshaped how games get built, a game he feels compelled to buy even if he barely plays it, and a game that should cost $200.
His co-host immediately told him he was going to get cancelled for this, which is roughly the correct reaction to a man suggesting your video game should cost more than your electricity bill.
Here is the thing. The $200 price tag is not actually the problem with this take. It's his reason for it.
Who Gets Your Money If GTA 6 Costs $200 Instead of $80
| Recipient | Do they get more? |
|---|---|
Sony or Microsoft (platform cut) | Yes, roughly a third of every digital sale |
Take-Two and its shareholders | Yes |
Rockstar as a corporate entity | Yes |
The animators, artists and engineers who crunched | No. They are salaried |
The workers who were dismissed | No |
The staff currently seeking union recognition | No |
Following the extra $120 through the chain to see who it actually reaches.
The GTA 6 price already annoys people in both directions as it is. Player think $80 is too much. Investors think it is too little. Thompson has simply taken the investor position and driven it off a cliff, like a madman who's justifying their thrill-seeking behaviour because, well, why not?
You see, Rockstar does not price GTA 6 based on how hard it was to make, any more than a restaurant prices a steak based on how tired the chef is. It prices it at whatever number makes the most total money, and the number that makes the most money is emphatically not $200, because GTA does not make its fortune on the box price at all. The real money is made from Grand Theft Auto Online, which pulled in something north of eight billion dollars over its life through people buying in-game money via Shark Cards over and over for a decade.
A $200 entry fee would gut that. Fewer buyers mean smaller online population and less spending over the next ten years. Rockstar charging $80 is a company that knows exactly what it is doing, keeping the door wide so it can charge you for the next decade instead. Thompson is essentially praising Rockstar for a discount that is really a funnel.
Besides, if we ended up paying $200 instead of $80, would that extra $120 even go towards each individual developer's pockets?
Not one cent of a higher price reaches the people whose exhaustion Thompson says he wants to honor. Developers are on salaries. They do not get a bonus because you paid extra. They got paid the same whether you hand over $80 or $200, and the difference goes to a platform holder, a publicly traded company, and its shareholders.
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If you genuinely believe GTA 6 represents an unsustainable human cost, don't pay double. It's better to want the people who made it to have better conditions, which is precisely what Rockstar staff pushing for union recognition are actually asking for.
To be fair to Thompson, he is trying to say that something enormous and painstaking has been made, that it is probably a high-water mark, and that it feels strange for such a thing to be priced roughly the same as any other game. It is also, and there is no polite way around this, a take that only makes sense if money is not a constraint for you. Thompson says he might not even play it much and would buy it anyway, as a gesture. Most people aren't in as lovely of a position in life.
As of the time of writing, players are stacking gift cards, grinding rewards points, and hunting every legitimate discount going because eighty dollars is genuinely a lot of money to a lot of people, and the anger about the current price is not something we made up. It's very real, especially with the ongoing debate about physical disc manufacturing.
The strangest part of all this is that Thompson has accidentally made the best argument against his own position. He says GTA 6 is worth more because of what it cost the people who built it, which is exactly why the answer is not to send more money to the people who did not build it.