GTA 6 Costing As Much As $100 Could Help Video Game Industry Rebound In 2025, Analyst Says

Veteran investment analyst and researcher Matthew Ball of Epyllion has released a gargantuan, 219-page report about the “State of Video Gaming in 2025,” and some of the presentation looks at how the video game industry can possibly grow in 2025. In a section titled “How Player, Playertime, and Player Spend Might Return to Growth,” Ball mentioned a variety of opportunities, including Grand Theft Auto VI costing as much as $100 when it launches this year.

Ball said “there is hope” that Take-Two will price GTA 6 at “$80 or even $100,” which could prove to be a turning point for the video game industry. This could break a “key price barrier” and allow other developers to raise prices as well, he said. Before this, a Baldur’s Gate 3 developer said GTA 6 could prompt a shift to more expensive games if Take-Two decides to price it above $70.

$70 is the current market rate for new AAA releases, and in fact, it was Take-Two that was among the first to raise prices from $60 to $70 back in 2020. Many are naturally wondering if Take-Two might raise prices again for GTA 6’s launch, but it remains to be seen if that will happen. Beyond updating the sticker price for games, video game publishers have found other ways to get more money out of players, including expensive special editions, microtransactions, and battle passes, just to name a few.

GTA V, for example, has sold more than 205 million copies and brings in lots of money from the microtransactions in GTA Online. Early predictions have said GTA 6 could sell 40 million copies and earn more than $3 billion in revenue during its first year alone.

Ball said GTA 6’s launch this year will have a “mixed” impact on total player hours and revenue across the gaming industry because it’ll only be available on console (a PC release is expected after the console launch). However, Ball said GTA 6 will “severely” cannibalize total hours and spending that would go to other video games when it launches. For its part, Ubisoft has said GTA 6 is good for the video game industry overall because a huge game like that may help more people turn to gaming.

Some of the other areas that Ball listed off as having potential for growth in 2025 included the further expansion into “non-core” markets, user-generated content, social game services, the Nintendo Switch 2, other new handhelds and devices, AA/AAA mobile gaming, app store regulation, new game genres, generative AI, and advertising.

For the Switch 2, Ball said Nintendo’s own games dominate the Switch sales charts because many popular multiplatform games aren’t available on the console. When popular multiplatform games do come to Switch, they often have an “enormous performance drop,” which could push players to buy a game on a different device instead, Ball said. With the Switch 2, though, the leaked specs suggest the console will be able to “adequately” support most modern games, he said.

In terms of the issues the video game industry faces, Ball said there are numerous contributing factors, including an “exhaustion of decade-plus growth drivers,” as well as “competitive and budgetary escalations.” Ball added that “acute macroeconomic financial events and epidemics” negatively affected the video game business, as well as “microeconomic platform policy shifts.” A number of “would-be growth drivers” have also failed to materialize, he said.

The full report is a fascinating and in-depth look at the video game industry that is well worth a read.