Warhorse Studios Co-Founder Hopes GTA 6 Will Make Every Game More Expensive

Just a little over a year ago, Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima was throwing shade at Grand Theft Auto VI. Fast forward to today and he still isn't the biggest fan of Grand Theft Auto but he is rooting for it and its $80 price tag. The Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer says that GTA 6 is the one game that can drag base prices up across the board and, as we've already mentioned, he's openly rooting for it to do exactly that.

As development costs keep climbing, the audience has largely stopped growing and the easy wins from going digital are no longer enough, leaving little wiggle room for video game developers outside of a price increase:

The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price. That would help a lot, but everybody's scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost.

He sees Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive as uniquely able to go first. They are, in his words, the only ones "who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games," something he calls "long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive." He even signs off wishing them luck.

The economics behind his wish are the real reason he is pushing this. Games cost more to make every year as hardware and player expectations climb. The player base is not expanding fast enough to cover it. Digital storefronts already wrung out the savings from cutting retail out of the loop, which Klima puts bluntly, "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money." The pandemic demand spike that papered over all of this was temporary. In his telling, raising the base price is the only lever left and nobody wants to be the first to pull it.

That is why GTA 6 matters to him specifically. A game this big can set a number the rest of the industry quietly follows. If $80 sticks for the biggest release of the decade, the thinking goes, the mid-tier studios that cannot risk the backlash get cover to charge more too. Analysts too have argued GTA 6 is actually underpriced and should cost more, so his perspective from the developer's side actually lines up with the rest of the industry except maybe for the consumers who will have to pay for the increased cost, literally.

There is a funny wrinkle, though. The same executive hoping GTA 6 reshapes the market has no personal interest in it. The series "doesn't appeal to me at all," Klima said, adding that he will not play GTA 6 "unless I'm somehow forced to," and that its popularity "beats me." He softens it by calling the games technical marvels and wishing them commercial success, but it's clear he's simply rooting for the price not the game itself.

None of this settles the fight we know too well. GTA 6's pricing upset nearly everyone, with fans calling $80 too steep, especially once the full cost of everything is added up, while analysts and executives argue it is too low. Klima's comments land firmly on the "not enough" side, from someone who has to make the math work at a smaller studio.

Coincidentally, other studios are "fighting" this by offering more for their premium versions and collector's editions at a substantially lower price point, so there's really no one way to go about how to navigate this increasingly alarming problem.

Ultimately, the real stakes are bigger than one game's price. Yes, GTA 6 is a cultural vacuum that's pretty much everywhere these days, from Miami to South Park and Call of Duty but it still has to bend to the market. If GTA 6 holds at $80 through its November launch and beyond, people like Klima expect the 2027 slate to follow it up to the new normal. If it meets enough resistance, the rest of the industry stays scared to move. Either way, a lot of studios are watching what happens with Rockstar's price, and at least one is openly cheering for it to go up.