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Should Video Games Cost More Than US$70? These Guys Seem To Think So…

Back in the day, at least in the 90s and 2000s, new titles for consoles usually cost US$50 to US$60. Of course, game development costs did not balloon to ludicrous amounts during the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5/Xbox Series generation: see titles like Halo Infinite, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare remake for examples.

One person’s solution to have publishers get their money back to justify these rising costs in development? Charge consumers higher. Such is the case of analyst group Epyllion, who stated in their recent State of Video Gaming in 2025 report that a big title like Grand Theft Auto 6 could cost up to US$100 to sell to the public.

With publisher Take-Two Interactive making the decision to jack up the price, the analyst group hopes that other big publishers like EA could follow suit and raise their title’s default pricing. This is with hopes to offset swelling triple-A development costs and surviving in a world with global inflation.

That’s not bloody likely. Rockstar Games and Take-Two are a rare exception where they can charge a game that much and get away with it because it’s a Grand Theft Auto game: one of the game industry’s most mainstream title around that transcends beyond pop culture. If other triple-A studios charged US$100 for their FIFAs and CoDs, it will not meet the same success and results as Rockstar’s franchise.

Even if it could work, this method is just a band-aid to the underlying problem that needs fixing: game development should not be spiralling out of control like this.

 

Let’s take a look at the Epyllion breakdown of game dev cost.

Keep in mind that all the games past the US$250 million mark alone are all from Western developers and publishers. Final Fantasy XVI is the only big-budget triple-A game from Japanese developers (with loads of external developer help by the by) that is just shy of the US$250 million mark. And that’s only because Square Enix has adopted a lot of Western game dev habits for FFXVI’s creation.

I played FFXVI and while I thought it was a great game, I highly doubt all those awesome action setpieces with Ifrit and so forth should have ballooned the game dev cost to that ludicrous amount. God of War 3 for the PS3 back in 2010 costs a third of FFXVI and had arguably better setpieces and epic boss fights. Even when accounting for inflation, GoW 3 wouldn’t have ballooned past the US$100 million mark.

Conversely, Halo Infinite (dubbed Halo 6 here) would have its development cost significantly lower if it had a competent studio working on it and relied less on Microsoft’s hiring practice of just relying on contractors. How on earth has the Western games industry survived this long without learning a thing from the past? It boggles the mind…

My only hope here is that publishers like Sega and Koei Tecmo reveal their spending budgets for their top-selling franchises like Like A Dragon/Yakuza, Persona, and Dynasty Warriors. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that it’ll be less than US$150 million because judging from the the look and feel of the games, they reuse a lot of assets and just stick to what they know rather than pivoting anew.

Obviously this is not something that can be fixed overnight. But it is a bit too late to de-escalate the situation and be disciplined about it when game developers & publishers had the opportunity to do during the 10 years leading up to now.

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