GTA 6 publisher CEO thinks videogame prices are "very, very low" for what they offer

[Ezekiel 25:17]

I LOVE it. Get money Rockstar. Stupid people wanna blow real money on microtransactions, raise the price of the brick

GTA 6 publisher CEO thinks videogame prices are "very, very low" for what they offer​

But that doesn't mean publishers have the power to raise them
Image credit: Take-Two Interactive

News by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell News Editor

84 comments
Speaking to investors in an earnings call this week, GTA 6 publisher Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick had a bit to say about the eternally uncontroversial topic of videogame prices. In news worth holding the press for, he thinks they're pretty cheap for what you get in return.
Advertisement

Zelnick cautioned one investor against "generalising" about the state of game pricing based on the recent fortunes of TV and movie subscription services like Netflix, which have had to increase subscription fees to match their expenses after underpricing themselves initially to grow their audiences. Videogames might be all about subscription services these days, Zelnick said, but that doesn't mean they are subject to the same commercial logics as ye olde non-interactive media. In particular, it doesn't mean publishers are currently able to raise videogame prices, even if they feel like they're overdelivering.

GTA 6 publisher CEO doubts AI generation tools will make games more profitable or cheaper
Read more on Rock Paper Shotgun
By way of explanation, Zelnick shared a little of Take-Two's own methodology for calculating videogame prices (be warned that the following sentence may give you a headache). "In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that's perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to," he said.



Let me try to simplify that for us non-C-suite-based lifeforms: price is about the relationship between what you get per hour, how many hours you can expect to get, and what you perceive to be the overall value of the thing you're playing, watching, etc.
"You'll see that that bears out in every kind of entertainment vehicle," Zelnick went on. "By that standard our prices are still very, very low, because we offer many hours of engagement, the value of the engagement is very high. So I think the industry as a whole offers a terrific price to value opportunity for consumers."
"That doesn't necessarily mean that the industry has pricing power, or wants to have pricing power," he added. "However, there is a great deal of value offered, and look, it's our strategy here to deliver much more value than what we charge consumers, that's always been our strategy.
"We want to ensure our experience is first class, and the nature of the experience is not just the quality of what we offer, it's what you pay for it," Zelnick continued. "Everyone knows that anecdotally. So that's how we look at it. There have been precious few pricing increases in the business. The price increase to, for example, 70 dollars for certain frontline products [in 2022] was the first price increase for many years after many generations. So I think we offer terrific value to consumers."
Zelnick is far from the only multi-millionaire exec who thinks blockbuster commercial games are considerably underpriced, though he seems relatively relaxed about it, possibly because he's in charge of the company making Grand Theft Auto.
Advertisement

In September, Capcom’s president Harushiro Tsujimoto gave a speech at the Tokyo Game Show (thanks Kotaku) claiming that videogame prices are "too low" given that, according to Tsujimoto, development costs are now "100 times" higher than during the Famicon era. "There is also a need to raise wages," he added. "Considering the fact that wages are rising in the industry as a whole, I think raising unit prices is a healthy option for business."
Rock Paper Shotgun is the home of PC gaming

 

[ORDER_66]

greed pure and fukking simple.. these ceo's got their heads up their asses trying to squeeze blood from a stone when the well has run dry...they dont live in the real world and is out of touch... he better keep the base game $70 and be happy people will buy it...he's gonna learn something if he tries that $100 per game rumor i heard

 

[In The Zone '98]

He wanna charge $100 out the gate so bad.

 

[Cladyclad]

Tbh they really are

 

[Lord-Yosh]

Certain games I would agree but that's why they have expansions and dlc

 

[Batsute]

He’s not wrong, but they’d just double dip on games and services.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

He’s right

 

[ORDER_66]

He’s right

no he's not most of these new games come out is fukking mid... that's why their trying to phase out disc drive games so that YOU will be stuck with the trash that you cannot resell to gamestop or back online...Read between the lines gizmo...

 

[ALonelyDad]

Take Two is arguably the greediest publisher in the game right now, lol at him wanting more.

 

[AKM-95]

I've been playing videogames my whole life but I'm not paying neo-geo prices in 2023 to play anything

 

[Womb Raider]

I literally just had said R* will fukk around and drop GTA 6 and GTA 6 online for $80 each or $150 together…goddamn it this is about to be reality.

 

[Ciggavelli]

Full games have been costing $109, if you want the expansion and deluxe content. It’s like every full game now is $109. I’ve been seeing what has been going on.

GTA is like one of the only series’s that could get away with charging $100 for the base game only. I mean, who doesn’t want to play GTA6? Charging $100 for a base game when a game is only like 12 hours long is not gonna work though for most people I’d guess.

 

[Illuminatos]

He’s basically saying them GTA 6 microtransactions are about to be generational.

 

[CopiousX]

He is right. Even if you ignore inflation, video games are an incredible value. A 2 hour movie gives you noninteractive entertainment for $10.

While a 50 hour mid tier, interactive game costs you 70. If games had the same cost structure per hour as movies, then the actual cost of a game should be $250 each.

 

[Rigby.]

I’m starting to see the per hour mental exercise more often, and honestly I get it. GTA V is probably the most lucrative product in the modern history of entertainment, if you think about what you got out of $70, especially for a console gamer. It’d either be that, Fortnite or Minecraft, but I’d contend that the GTA-ness of GTA puts it over the latter two.

The problem is that there’s no dollar amount that you could ever put on GTA 6 as a product that would capture the “full amount” of profit Rockstar could get. At some point, you accept a diminished amount somewhere, so you thrive elsewhere. For 5, they give you a $70 game, 0 single player content, and make things so expensive in Online that you subsist on the micro economy. Idk why they couldn’t do the same thing with 6 even if it costs substantially more to make, but we’ll see.