Over a decade of development and an estimated budget between $1-2 Billion, I am okay with paying ten bucks more. There are significantly lesser games selling for full retail.
Excuse my silly question, but what's the point of pre-buying a game, if it will only exists as a downloadable copy. I get you want to gift it for xmas, but for the rest of players? The point of pre-sale is to make sure you will get one when it comes out?
no the point of presale is none with this specific release
its in all cases just a digital copy and of those, they can generate infinite amount of codes...
so personally im just gonna wait a year for the PC release
(a year max 2 is most likely)
They say it's $100 for the ultimate edition but really, due to how much stuff they're locking into only that edition (certain shops and stores in game), that's the base edition and the $80 one is the lite edition. It is simply a marketing trick to have a 100 dollar price tag without as much pushback.
Some backstory - I like gaming quite a bit - but more of a personal archivalist. I have basically all games I've ever played on physical media and try to keep someway to play them offline - just jailbroke my 360 to be able to play games from HDD incase the DVD drive broke. Anyway...
I saw the no DVD and was initially devastated. I'm in two minds - I saw one post that basically said "it won't contain a DVD at launch".. if I read between the lines, though I'm not sure I see the value incentive for Rockstar, but...
If they hypothetically launched with physical boxes with digital download codes, okay... This would definitely be in the name of re-sellers (as they've stated). But this is the same as piracy, which has always been, not that "we need to stop people from pirating our games for eternity" but "we need to stop people pirates our game for X months after launch", which makes sense (the piracy party).
So, I'm wondering, if they actually begin releasing physical disks (offline, re-sellable, usable in 20 years), say, 6-12 months after releasing the game.. would that work? I mean, for me, assuming it's the equal block-buster to the franchise I adore (in a varying sense), then I might not mind too much to pick up a copy after 6-12 months (I don't care about bleeding edge).. but... would this work? If we assume the first 12M of buyers can't resell, would the people who buy the game after 12M actually bring a great number to the second hand market.. perhaps not?
I really have the idea of having games that I love in physical form that I know it can't be taken away.. similar to reading a book that you end up reading and know you want to come back to anytime in the future.. and this would _suck_ if I couldn't get a copy (and I assume all PC versions would be full of online-only DRM stuff anyway).
I've been seeing a lot of drama around price increases in games, but I just don't find it to be that bad. I mean, 25 years ago a new game cost $50, and now that huge open worlds are common and the playtime can be in the hundreds of hours, and adjusting for inflation, I don't think $80 is a huge ask.
At the same time though they have a much larger customer base to sell to. Most things get cheaper with higher sales volume. If course that is probably part of the reason why the price of games stayed similiar for so long. But it is still a good thing to keep in mind, especially with such a well known studio.
Some games (lots of ROM chips) cost even more in the cart era. I paid $70 for NBA Jam on SNES in 1994, which is about $160 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.
I think this is a reasonable compromise. Let's face it - they could have made this a $100 game (or even more) and many people would have bought it. I would have bought it. I'm not sure if it needs to go to Neo-Geo game costs ($200+?) but Rockstar has earned enough of my trust to buy in.
That said, I think I've bought GTA5 two or three times for various platforms over the years. I doubt we'll see GTA6 on sale for years.
As they say in the automotive industry, buy once, cry once. (Pay more for the known good thing, rather than buying the cheap third party things... I'm looking at you, $30 clockspringexperts.com that I have replaced 3 times in the past 4 years... instead of buying the $300 toyota part once)
It will be very interesting to see if this lives up to the hype and/or if it is able to recoup the enormous amount of money spent developing it. The expectations from everyone seem to be so high; it's a very long way to the bottom if it somehow flops.
Personally, things got a little too realistic for me around the time of GTA IV. The earlier games felt like cartoony fun but I started to feel bad about the stuff I was doing in IV. I tried V a year or two back (I think they've maybe remastered it since?) but it ran so terribly on the Steam Deck that I refunded it.
Long time GTA fan and I have to agree. There’s an unbelievable amount riding on this one, and I feel like the GTA satirical magic is somewhat lost. From what I heard, a lot of the original team from R* have left - but let’s see! Real info is scarce.
It will flounder for years as a game rife with startup screens, unskippable content, microtransactions, an intermittently working forever online connection, and a toxic multiplayer.
Then it will hit PC. Mods will breathe new life into it. Cracks will dispense away with the invasive framerate-killing mechanisms. An underground P2P multiplayer client will be developed and it will get wildly successful. Rockstar will sue, then finally settle.
This feels expensive, but I remember SNES games costing $60 in the 90s. If anything, the cost of videogames has been pretty resistant to inflation, I'd say?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadSo what's the point of that? Why waste all that money and energy shipping "physical copies" when it could just be an email
so personally im just gonna wait a year for the PC release (a year max 2 is most likely)
I saw the no DVD and was initially devastated. I'm in two minds - I saw one post that basically said "it won't contain a DVD at launch".. if I read between the lines, though I'm not sure I see the value incentive for Rockstar, but...
If they hypothetically launched with physical boxes with digital download codes, okay... This would definitely be in the name of re-sellers (as they've stated). But this is the same as piracy, which has always been, not that "we need to stop people from pirating our games for eternity" but "we need to stop people pirates our game for X months after launch", which makes sense (the piracy party).
So, I'm wondering, if they actually begin releasing physical disks (offline, re-sellable, usable in 20 years), say, 6-12 months after releasing the game.. would that work? I mean, for me, assuming it's the equal block-buster to the franchise I adore (in a varying sense), then I might not mind too much to pick up a copy after 6-12 months (I don't care about bleeding edge).. but... would this work? If we assume the first 12M of buyers can't resell, would the people who buy the game after 12M actually bring a great number to the second hand market.. perhaps not?
I really have the idea of having games that I love in physical form that I know it can't be taken away.. similar to reading a book that you end up reading and know you want to come back to anytime in the future.. and this would _suck_ if I couldn't get a copy (and I assume all PC versions would be full of online-only DRM stuff anyway).
Ergh, I dunno
Not that it'll affect me personally; I'm not buying this game after Rockstar's [union busting][1]!
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9v10rr1meeo
That said, I think I've bought GTA5 two or three times for various platforms over the years. I doubt we'll see GTA6 on sale for years.
As they say in the automotive industry, buy once, cry once. (Pay more for the known good thing, rather than buying the cheap third party things... I'm looking at you, $30 clockspringexperts.com that I have replaced 3 times in the past 4 years... instead of buying the $300 toyota part once)
Personally, things got a little too realistic for me around the time of GTA IV. The earlier games felt like cartoony fun but I started to feel bad about the stuff I was doing in IV. I tried V a year or two back (I think they've maybe remastered it since?) but it ran so terribly on the Steam Deck that I refunded it.
Then it will hit PC. Mods will breathe new life into it. Cracks will dispense away with the invasive framerate-killing mechanisms. An underground P2P multiplayer client will be developed and it will get wildly successful. Rockstar will sue, then finally settle.
This effectively eliminates buying and re-selling of the game.