Warhorse boss wants GTA 6 to make $80 normal - but who pays the bill here?

Ask anyone who buys games with a regular local salary what the industry needs most, and "higher prices" won't be the answer. Martin Klima sees it differently.

The Warhorse Studios co-founder - the man behind last year's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 - told PC Gamer he hopes GTA 6 will be the game that pushes prices up, with $80 becoming the new normal. In his words, it's "long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive."

I'll give him this: his argument isn't empty PR. Development costs have exploded, while the pool of people who regularly buy new games has more or less stopped growing. And he's refreshingly blunt about digital stores too - publishers cut out the retail middleman, and, as he put it, "we destroyed retail, and we took all their money." That's an unusually honest admission from a studio boss.

Where the logic breaks

The problem is what happens between the dollar price and the euro price on the shelf. Dollar prices are quoted before sales tax; ours come with VAT already baked in. So when the American figure climbs, the euro sticker tends to follow it one-to-one, sometimes beyond. A jump that feels like a minor adjustment to a US player feels very different measured against wages in our region.

And here's the irony in Klima's retail line. Digital took the money from shops - but the physical copy is exactly what has kept full price bearable for a lot of players locally. You buy a disc, finish it, sell it on for a decent chunk back. You lend it to a friend. You pick one up second-hand a few months after launch. Every price hike makes that loop more valuable, and every all-digital release makes it harder.

There's also a quieter point: the games that sold best in recent years at full price were rarely the ones that felt overpriced. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 itself did very well without needing a premium tag. People pay when they feel they're getting their money's worth - and pull back hard when they don't.

GTA 6 as the icebreaker

Klima is probably right that if anyone can shift the ceiling, it's Rockstar. GTA 6 will sell to people who buy one or two games a year, whatever it costs. The risk is what comes after: every other publisher pointing at it as justification, without the budget, the scale or the polish to back it up.

I don't think the cheaper-games era is coming back, and I'm not pretending budgets are fiction. But if $80 becomes the norm, I'd want it to come with something in return - real physical editions, fair regional pricing, no day-one microtransactions on top. Otherwise players here will simply do what they've always done: wait for the sale, buy used, and share.

Image: Nicholas / CC BY 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Retro_gaming_shop_in_Akihabara,_Japan.jpg