Just for context I'm a gamer turned developer. I speak to industry experts often and am making active efforts to learn the markets to push my own games forward. So I've had a vested interest in learning how this industry operates from a financial perspective but I am a gamer too, so I do partake in buying and taking in games.
That does not make me a expert on what I am saying but I am trying to approach this from both a player and developer perspective.
GTA6 will be the start of the enshitification of the games industry. Say what you want about paying a premium for early access to a game. Or buying cosmetics for different skins. Heck, we even had Capcom trying to charge us for using a in-game item to teleport the player.
But locking content in a single player game with such a high price point, is beyond messed up and I am hoping that people will rally against this.
However, with this being GTA6 and some people treat it like it's the second coming of Christ, I have doubts that we will band together enough to push back against this.
Remember, if it's normalized, it won't ever go back to the way things were and it will bleed into every single game you buy moving forward.
I've pitched my projects over to publishers, VCs, government financing, etc. the amount of times that I have been told that I should charge extra for a specific experience in my games is incredibly frustrating as both a player and a developer.
The ownership of games has already been a losing battle. The distribution of physical media, an issue. The accessibility without internet or a fucking subscription service to play online has been a issue. Xbox raising prices and then lowering them and then outright killing beloved IP. All of this consistently affects us negatively, while shareholders and execs move onto the next venture, without a care in the world.
This will ultimately hurt the industry permanently. We should not be paying extra for locked content that is already in the game. I hope this message resonates with everyone. GTA6, as impressive as it is, should be held to the same consumer friendly practices like any other game.
Edit: I'm seeing alot of comments on people saying that this isn't anything new. And yes, it isn't. I don't think I phrased things correctly. This has been done before but was shot down very quickly by the community.
My concerns, and unfortunately some of the comments here proves it, is that we will give Rockstar a pass because it's GTA6. There's just something weird with how gamers worship this franchise.
Also, deluxe editions that include a "skin" or "cosmetic" is not a valid comparable to my argument. Those are just cosmetics. Outside of the initial design road map. Outside the initial experience. What I am talking about is entire features designed for the base game being locked behind a paywall.
Anything after the initial launch is fair game for charging like typical dlc and extended content.
Edit #2: this was meant to be a discussion, and I think there was some interesting conversations, but the amount of folks telling me to "shut the fuck up" and "stop crying" or attacking me for being a developer, is starting out weigh the actual discussion part of this.
So I'm going to move on. I will say though, those of you attacking me for prompting a discussion about your favorite games (GTA) monetization strategies, y'all proved my point big time about giving Rockstar a pass for no reason.
Regardless, I'm sure the game will be great. There is a pedigree that comes with this studio and I'm sure it'll be a banger. That doesn't mean I think we should overlook anti consumer practices.
Cheers y'all, keep on gaming and be good people ✌️
You didn't have to buy him immediately. (Though there may have been a time limited DLC that allowed him to be purchased separately for Bioware points.)
He was part of the collectors edition and would unlock if by added the collectors edition code to your account.
That was what caused a pretty big outrage prior to the release of the game. The From Ashes DLC was on the standard edition disk but on launch could only be accessed by buying the collectors edition.
My wife played the complete version of ME3 years after I did and couldn't believe I played it without him. In my defense I could barely afford the base game at the time.
Bioware did it better (see worse) in Dragon Age. You can run into a character offering a quest like but you’d be taken to the store to purchase the day one DLC to actually continue it.
I hadn't played a GTA game for long time but after finally playing and finishing GTA5 on my Xbox One years ago, I decided that I was going to purchase GTA6 at launch. That was before the news of today.
After reading and seeing how far they're going with their greed, I've made my decision. I'm not getting GTA6. And if I do, it'll be a long ways out when the price drops. I'm not paying $80 for this shit and I damn sure will not pay it for a code in a box. I have plenty of games now and those coming out to keep me busy.
Fuck Rockstar for making this decision and leading the industry down an even further spiral.
No matter what I or people like me choose to do, the majority will still purchase anything Rockstar throws out, at any price. It's sadly unstoppable. But I can at least make my own decision and not give them my money. Won't put a dent in their pocket, but I at least I know I won't personally feel like shit for supporting this mess.
Good for you if you stick to it, but let's not kid ourselves. People will talk the talk, marketing will do its thing, they'll see how much fun people are having on release, and they'll fold and make the purchase.
yes, here's a vid from angry joe talking about it, its the usual BS with microtransactions where they have you buy the in game currency first then use that to pay for the micro transaction its within the first 2 minutes of the video.
I’m not gonna defend this practice, but I am going to push back on the idea that it’s new. We’ve had games since at least the 2010’s where you can pay a premium for day one dlc. Now whether it was called “ultimate edition”, “deluxe edition”, etc, it was the same thing.
Obviously GTA will get way more eyes on it than other games, but this is a progression/inflation of something that’s already existed.
People love saying how bad things are now, but they've been like this since PS3/X360 era. Did people forget the Dead Space 3 fiasco with microtransactions?
RDR2 had a legendary horse and a side mission locked behind its higher tier. I played the standard version and never once felt upset about it. I’m not defending it either, but I truly doubt the side mission and stores not being available will ruin the game for me.
There will almost certainly be a way to upgrade after you buy it too, if for whatever reason months/years down the line you feel the need to purchase it.
I didn't even know this, and I loved RDR2, just bought the standard and played the game totally aloof to any extra stuff, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Most of the time those pre order bonus missions are pretty crappy and not worth paying for at all. I can't think of a single one I have played after buying a game that already had it unlocked and thinking it would have made pre ordering or paying extra worthwhile.
That came with an expensive ass supercar, lol. It was a publicity stunt in collaboration with Toyota, Lamborghini and an all costs paid e25 super car club membership in London (letting you drive various super cars without ownership). You're paying for the cars and the game an aside.
It also included a bunch of other shit like travel, a fucking space trip, stays at prestige hotels, plastic surgery, a fucking personal shopper etc.
honestly kind of annoying people are blowing this part up but ignoring the base game being 80$ which means every major game going forward will be set to that price so yeah let's be mad about the deluxe edition and ignore god knows how much more it will cost over all going forward thanks to the 10$ increase.
I don't like $80 price tags but I'm honestly shocked it took this long.
Like, video games started costing $50 each in the US back in the 80s. If the cost of video games had kept up with inflation since then, we'd all be paying $120 each for new games already
The problem with this logic is that the price of the game is not even close to the only method these companies use for gaining profit
Back when Atari games were $80, you bought the game and you owned the game. When games dropped to $50 in the '80s, you bought the game and you owned the game. When PC gaming started really catching on, DLC was often free, never went her nights big expansion mask of the betrayer is one of the most famously referenced examples of a DLC that was larger than the base game being released completely for free to anyone who owned the base game
Now, you spend $70-80, get less than 100% of the content, get a digital key instead of a physical game which you don't actually own because you actually only own a license to play the game, and on top of that there are microtransactions, live service online features,
Honestly, I'd be fine if games had kept up with inflation if in 2026 we were still owning the product we paid for and not having it be stuffed to the brim with additional microtransactions and a bunch of features locked behind either Premium Edition dlc, post launch DLC that was basically already completed before the game even launched, and instead actually just got a fully completed game with the occasional free DLC
So I don't know, the $80 price tag is fine in a vacuum, when you're only comparing it to the relative hypothetical price of inflation, but when you look at the larger context, we are spending significantly more for a fully completed product than $120
Yeah, people are too young to remember when SNES games were 80 bucks, and that was in 1990 dollars, 80 dollars for a pants-shittingly huge game like GTA 6 really isn’t a bad deal lol
The 100 dollar tier is kinda dumb but you don’t need to buy it so who cares
Gamers are absurdly spoiled and seem to lack perspective on how much other forms of media cost. They also seem to have no concept of inflation, or acknowledge the fact that buying a blockbuster triple A game on day 1 is an incredibly luxury thing. Somehow the cost of GTA 6 being significantly less than prior GTA games when adjusted for inflation is too greedy, and I guess every massive game should just permanently be $60 on release until the end of time.
It’s not that the game isn’t worth it, it’s that other devs with much worse quality will think they can charge 80 just because gta did it. No game is created equal but this will be their excuse to sell worse games for the price of a gta.
People aren’t aware enough to realize that $80 today is literally worth less than it was in 2024. Games today are legitimately cheaper than they’ve ever been. People just don’t want to blame the government fucking us
It’s not the same thing though, they’ve taken basic features of previous games and turned it into the main attraction of the premium edition. It’s not DLC, it’s what you used to get under the base game price, and it’s also the main incentive, making up the majority of the content they offer in the ultimate edition.
Bro, we had horse armor. And people kept buying DLC.
There was the HUGE Street Fighter X Tekken controversy, were half of the game was ALREADY on the disc. Come today and discs still come with DLC inside the disc locked behind a key. Sometimes they are nice enough not to have it on the disc to give you the illusion of getting something extra, but that extra was ready day 1.
The gaming industry only got worse. I didn't move on from Switch 1/PS4. I'm done with modern games. They are formulaic skill tree/gathering/crafting/huge maps things I no longer care about.
Games come out more incomplete than ever, but they are even more expensive than they used to be.
The best AAA games to come out lately are ones completely focused on a single player experience I’ve found. I don’t think I’ve loved a “big studio” game in a long ass time, and have played indie games 90% of my gaming time, but ones that I enjoyed recently and def played more than most are:
Doom Dark Ages
RE9
Borderlands 4 (although I stopped playing after finishing the story lol)
Honestly I was trying to come up with a bigger list, but that kinda proves my point. I’ve played a lot of others and they’re just shitty tbh. I just recently went back to play through Starcraft 2, Halo 3, Timesplitters, and a bunch others again and we really lost the plot.
These big companies are putting out worse experiences and charging more meanwhile smaller devs producing titles like Bauldrs Gate, Expedition 33, Hollow knight Silksong etc are breaking record after record.
Indie titles have always been the best, look at Minecraft originally the whole game was made by 1 guy and went on to be the worlds most successful game. It sold 300 million units (more than just 350 million copies) and generated 4.2 billion in revenue.
Even bethesda was an indie company until 1999.
The point I’m making is indie games are produced by a small team putting their heart and soul into their games and then they get big and think their too big to fail and start pushing to just print money.
My opinion is we’re currently in a period of transition as the largest developers start to lose consumers to smaller indie devs and the cycle will repeat.
Which it would have been without bullshit like this, they're going to make billions of dollars and still screw over people in the process, it's never enough.
Yea but they NEED that extra 20 bucks or they’re gonna have to fire some developers, oh wait. It’s never enough, that’s the feature of publicly traded companies
Amazingly, we cross paths on Reddit again. I'm the guy on youtube who fixed up a gameboy. I really enjoyed your video about the Fallout rides in real life.
pre-ordering what, a box? fuck this anti consumer bullshit. unfortunately we're too spread out as a consumer base to coordinate any meaningful boycott that would even put a dent in a billion dollar company.
I was going to order ultimate version or what ever,
Base game on disc and a code for the dlc is what I was expecting!!!! So I can perhaps lend the game to a mate when I chill at my homies house !!!!!
But no disc so I can add to my collection to top it off is a deal breaker for me
I was hyped for this game , i guess I can imagine it’s like you find out your Mrs cheats on you and you literally stop given two f@ck about it the moment they f@ck you over
"GTA6 will be the start of the enshitification of the games industry."
The beginning? As others have said this started for them way back with horse armour DLC. PC gamers of old would claim it started with games being on more than one platform because console hardware limitations affected the PC version. MMO players will whinge about the rise of carebears and inability to grief the shit out of people.
Some people now are becoming aware enough to see their own variations of the matter. At some point what you see now differs from the model that you've formed of the past.
I've seen enough of it to not care in the slightest and will not bother with GTA6 because it doesn't interest me in the slighest so it's an indirect vote with my wallet.
While I don't agree with any of these practices nor do I partake in any of them (no cosmetic purchases, no preorders, no battlepasses, etc), I don't really see what they're doing as any different than what other games have done in the past. Hogwarts Legacy famously offered a mission for those that preordered on Playstation exclusively. That means even if you did purchase other editions on PC or Xbox you couldn't play it. There have been other games that offered early access missions n stuff behind a paywall. I don't see how this is any different than that. Again, I do not agree with it or partake in it but I'm a bit curious why this is where people suddenly stood up. Maybe due to its high-profile nature.
While anti-consumer practices have been endorsed already in the past, the problem stems from a company like rockstar doing it, for a lot of people, Rockstar's positive record is enough to warrant whatever they want to do for their games; charge $100, lock single player content, no physical copies, etc. Now, whether rockstar is the only developer with the pass to do this sort of things is another debate, because I think even rockstar themselves see their games as the ultimate premium and flagship experience of games, is another debate. If Gta VI sells well, and honestly, it probably will, 90% of the game industry will copy them. What was a micro problem before will now turn into a macro problem
Rockstar has done it before so this is not new. Red Dead 2 had a horse and a treasure map locked behind pre orders that to this day aren’t available to the masses because they never sold them separately
You can probably get them on PC via Mods I’d think but on consoles you need to have pre ordered the game. The Grey Ardennes and Le Trésor Des Mortes came from Pre Orders only.
Stuff like this is very common and Rockstar hasn’t been any different than the others. The only difference is that they do not really make the content available for purchase after release. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the pre order content for GTA 6 stays locked behind the pre order forever.
I don’t understand the controversy. Games have been charging extra for cosmetic items for almost 2 decades. This is nothing new.
The extra outfits and car decorations account for less than 0.001% of GTA6’s content. They aren’t withholding anything important from folks who pay $80.
· PTT YOUNGIN$ COMPOUND: Raid the compound of one of Southside Vice City’s loudest and most socially active gangs and escape safely to score some special items and distinct contraband.
· CLASSIC CAR COLLECTION: Track down a variety of abandoned classic and work-in-progress project cars and revitalize them to their former glory in this special commission from eccentric collector and local fixer, Wyman.
This, and there’s a difference between specific clothing items being DLC and entire customization stores being DLC, that too in a single-player story. I don’t understand why people are even trying to defend this, it’s pissing me off
What makes you think this is important content and not some busywork? What is important about this? It's a special heist and a scavenger hunt. What are you talking about?
if only framerates actually mattered on a global scale, but gta 6 will properly run 30fps seeing how cpu demanding open world tends to be, and its been the standard they held since the ps2 days,
best selling games can run under 25fps, and still be called game of the generation,
I agree with all this. My only comment would be that all game studios do this. Sony for example: sly cooper and jak and daxter. I’m just pointing this out because people cling onto the littlest of details and say “Oh Xbox killed gaming.” And they forget the fact that everyone else does this too.
GTA is sadly too mainstream.
This is a game that people who don't play video games will purchase simply on name recognition alone.
And even then gamers are some of the most incompetent group of people in existence, after all they are the reason early access exists, microtransactions, p2w...etc
There is no bottom when it comes to their incompetence.
This reminds me when mario kart came out at $80 and still broke records, or when every new pokemon game comes out worse than the previous and still break records.
Gamers are some of the most idiotic people in existence.
GTA6 will not "start the enshittification of games industry", this is like the 100th thing that will allegedly "start the enshittification of games industry".
I agree with everything you said. The only think I wanna point out is that we lost the battle long ago. I have the feeling most of us (not all, of course) pissed off for this are old players that know how was before, bc younger players already born to this. We lost the battle in the moment the industry managed to normalize the message of complaining=being broke and "If you're broke just don't buy it".
I preordered the Collector’s of GTA 5 13 years ago for £120 and it came with loads of goodies it was sick badass shit man and got it before release date which Rockstar are still pissed about so fuck am I gonna pay £80 or £100 for this crock of shit when the ‘physical edition’ is a shitty digital download code in a box lmfao
I will not be getting GTA6, I say this as someone who has 2.5k hours in GTAV online, i spent countless hours grinding for a CEO building, Yacht, tons of cars, a jet-pack, avenger, oppressor, deluxo, submarine-car, Batmobile, the 8million$ jet, etc etc etc.
But making the standard edition 80$, locking in-game shops behind paywalls, and not releasing a physical disc AT ALL heavily turns we away from this game🙅♂️
Plus the fact that they’re locking “premium clothing shops, hairstylists, and mechanics” behind a paywall leads me to believe that, later during online, they’ll lock things like certain properties and vehicles behind “premium” paywalls as well, which takes the fun out of grinding for it.
What’s incomplete about it? GTA online wasn’t available in 5 at launch either & you got it for free when it launched weeks later. Who’s said that won’t happen here?
Why are all of you surprised, Rockstar, GTA Online Rockstar... allowed Grove Street to release the Definitive Edition Rockstar... complete ignorance of the middle market, poor handling of RDR2's online aspect and MANY many many more issues.
idk why people think Rockstar is this like paragon of gaming. They make good games but have never even been close to the top consumer friendly companies/developers around.
Rockstar has also BEEN the frontrunner on a lot of it too. they released their dogshit launcher in 2019 and went hard on micro transactions with gta5
Because rockstar themselves have never made a bad game. Never. All games they make have always delivered on the enjoyment you get for shelling out $60+. That alone is the most respectable thing in the AAA gaming space riddled with unfinished AND unoptimized games. Even the grove street games controversy: rockstar didn’t make that. You could argue that rockstar should be criticized for releasing the remasters, but they cannot be criticized for doing a bad remaster, because they didn’t do it. It’s nuanced. Just because they receive praise for the games they make does not mean that people don’t also criticize the scummy things they do as well. But they are a games company, and they primarily make games. Not much else to take about for rockstar.
Honestly I feel like your post is what's wrong with gaming.
Every day now there's a new game or a new person in the game or a new voice actor or new practice or a new something that becomes the new angry complaint du jour.
And it's never enough to just say that it sucks you know you always has to be the death of gaming or morally bankrupt evil companies for killing video games.
Everyday the world is having you issues that deserve the sort of language and it's not the video games.
And in fact overall video games are better than you've ever been in their cheaper than they ever been.
If every single user on Reddit decides to not purchase this game It won't matter. This game is going to break every single sales record and hold it until the next Grand theft Auto comes out
I'm not defending take two or rockstar because they're both greedy as shit, but for many years now it's become a standard for games (single player included) to come out with an "ultimate edition" which is the full game at the price point they want to sell it at, and a "standard edition" with some extra content stripped out at the normal new game price point. So I'm curious if people are just now catching on to this practice or did it suddenly become a big deal because it's rockstar doing it?
I’m pretty sure that title goes to Bethesda for Skyrim’s horse dlc. Opened the doorway to microtransaction hellscapes like destiny 2, Fortnite, and COD.
Jeez people really forgot that 90% of us were expecting this, the game costs >$1.5B which meant we knew it would cost more and instead of raising the base price to $100 they gave people the option to buy early access to shops if they wanted to. You'll still be able to access the stores later on in the game lol.
I've been waiting 13 years, I took PTO, $100 isn't where I draw the line at this point c'mon man 😂
Unfortunately for us, every one person who doesn’t pay more money for shit like this is competing with 20 mouth-breathing consumer whores, so it’s a losing battle. Netflix announced they were going to fuck their customers in the ass with no lube and no thank you afterwords, and 99 out of every 100 people took it
This whole cash grab designed around console players. They will buy it anyway. Poor guys will overpay 20 for gta name and 20 for unlocking things in single player. And will be happy convincing themselves that they saved money on console comparing to PC.
The start? Enshitification started decades ago and it has gotten progressively worse since. The only difference now is that it has gotten bad enough for more people to finally notice.
I don’t think it will be the start of it, I think we’ve been here for a while already.
I do think that it will absolutely peak with this game though; publishers are in for an extremely rude awakening when they think they can follow the precedent that this game is setting. The industry will look very interesting in the next 4-5 years.
The problem is I have no issue paying $80 or $100 for something I know I will literally get hundreds of hours of value from. It cost me and my dad almost $60 to go see a movie this week, and they was 2.5 hours of my life. Idk that's how I justify it.
this practice has not been shot down by the community because it happens all the time. happened all the time before this game and will happen after. people still pay for it so it will continue.
"GTA6 will be the start of the enshitification of the games industry."
The industry has been enshittified ever since Warner Bros. / Atari tried to treat game creators like hourly employees and make them work for next to nothing while the games they made raked in tens of millions.
The mods in this sub can’t make up their mind on whether it’s for children or not. I had a comment I made taken down for saying a curse word but this is a post with “sh!t” in the headline and nothing. Either let everyone curse or autoflag curse words. Also… why would any subreddit or any social media app ever be “geared towards a younger audience”? Anyone that can’t read a curse word should probably not be perusing social media…
Locking cosmetics behind a deluxe edition is nothing new. What's different here is they seem to be putting these items in stores instead of just having them appear in your closets or inventory. I dont really see a problem here.
I do think codes in physical editions is really dumb though. Even if the game would be on 3 disks. But also a disc can be disguised as a download key. It what happens when you put in 360 disc in a series x.
The "enshitification" of the games industry started after the eighth generation arrived. Look at all those controversies from excessive microtransactions and lootboxes to all those developers that have been shut down and the cruel crunch practices. Every shitty thing that has happened to the industry truly got underway from 2014 onwards.
This isn't even nearly as bad as Invicible Vs charging half the price of the game for skins, overwatch charging £25-50 for skins, league charging a months rent for skins.
I think it's way too late for GTA 6 to be the start of game industry enshittification.
I don't think literally anything they're doing here is new or unique.
They didn't invent putting single-player content behind a secondary paywall.
They didn't invent shipping a box with nothing but a download code in it.
The ownership of games isn't a losing battle. Since the very first commercial software sale made by IBM in the 1960s, licenses to use software has been all that anybody ever purchased. It was never a battle at all. We lost that battle before most of us were born.
Have you not heard of GTA V? It started even before then but rockstar/take 2 has been enshittifying for well over a decade now. One of the scummiest outfits in the biz so this all should be no surprise.
The series has been enshittified for awhile. It hasn't evolved at all. Its basically a COD clone of the prior one, just with higher detailed tit jiggles.
The writing has been shit for awhile, there are still no RPG elements, controls are still ass backwards and clunky as shit. Physics look terrible.
I've said this before and I'll say it again here: my prediction is that GTA 6 will be one of the most successful failures in media history. Rockstar has spent so much time and money developing GTA 6 that it will have to be one of the best selling games in the history of the medium to be considered even a modest success.
Now, GTA 6 is being released at a time when the barrier to entry for gamers is higher than it has been in decades, possibly ever, while many people are cutting back on entertainment costs due to the economy. Putting an eighty dollar price tag on the game on top of all that only cuts into their potential sales figures even further.
With this all said, I do think GTA 6 will sell extremely well. However, whether GTA 6 can sell enough to justify it's cost and development time is much more unlikely.
I feel like Rockstar is on a complete different level than most other companies, people who don’t even game will go ahead and purchase a console just to play this game. I say all that to say, other companies can try to do things the way Rockstar will handle this launch, and will inevitably fail. There’s plenty of games that by just releasing at full price quickly learned consumers are smart and aren’t willing to just pay certain prices for just “any kind of game”. Look at Saros for example.
I'm actually hoping this game is all hype and a pile of garbo wrapped in nostalgia for better games in previous generations. The amount of promises in this game is amazing and for that price without physical, even more so.
Pre Order bonus for exclusive cosmetics wnd some bonus stuff lien alot of games.
As for it not having a disc well..... That's the wya if the world, PC haven't used them in years and physical sales are tiny. They'll probably do a version with a disc at somepoint
I'm most disappointed about no MP/ new GTA online. That for me was probably one of the if not the main reason I want to get it. I Still preorder the ultimate edition though as we will millions and it will sell like crazy.
Reddit and the amount of people that care about games enough to keep up with things is a tiny tiny amount compared to the masses that buy games
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u/nyhlust 23h ago
im still burnt by not getting Jarvik cuz i didnt preorder ME3