youtu.be/G-7r9pL0Hqo?...

Just posting this as a counterpoint/additional context to Jesse's dismissal of the "Horses" situation

I feel like games from ~10 years ago I was more organically encouraged to explore and just exist in the world. The massive ballooning of game sizes means I feel rushed to just get through them and see everything, whereas in the past I wasn't staring at big time consuming in game to do lists

This 10 year old studio still do their plagiarism the old fashioned way

And that's before the ongoing revenue of the updated gta online they roll out for gta 6

Gta3 sold 14 million copies. Gta5 sold over 200 million copies. Assuming gta 6 sells around the same, that's 200M×$60 = $12 Billion. Let's be very ungenerous and assume that after retail fees and taxes they only take home 25% of that, that's still $4 Billion on a game with a budget of £2 Billion

I'm struggling to see how these are mutually exclusive statements. Currently people are buying a product. If the price raises too much, fewer people will buy the product.

Gta5/online alone has made over $8 billion and counting. The combined cost of producing gta5/online and red dead 2 and gta6 is under $4 billion. So actually they can afford to be "nice" to their customers, and leave them with more money to pay for the more important things

And the majority of those games are indies made on significantly lower budgets charging less than $20 that are not competing with the AAA space. And yes, the problem is people are poor. And if you price them out of buying your product, you're going to find the money dries up very quickly.

A reminder that gta5/online is the most profitable piece of media to ever exist. They don't *need* to raise the price for gta6

What you're not considering is the growth of the market. The market for video games is over 4 times larger now than it was in the mid 90s, so you can expect to reach a much larger audience, therefore negating the need to raise prices with inflation (providing you actually manage your budget)