Nobody Asked You, Bank Of America

Grand Theft Auto VI cannot and will not save the video game industry, but its titanic footfalls will set precedents no matter what comes of its twice-delayed launch. This has resulted in hordes of fans and pundits wondering, among other things, what the game will cost when it finally makes its craterous impact in November. And now, even though absolutely nobody asked them, that includes Bank of America.

Seeking Alpha reports that following IICON, the new conference for industry bigwigs from the trade association that used to host E3, Bank of America is now advocating for an $80 GTA VI price point. It seeks, of course, to revitalize a flagging industry—and, reading between the lines of the word “bank,” make boatloads of money.

"We also heard from attendees that the industry, which is perceived as struggling, would have difficulty selling games for $80 if GTA VI came out at $70,” said Bank of America stock analyst Omar Dessouky. “We think it’s in Take-Two's self-interest, as a publisher and partner to many developers, to raise the price point for the entire industry.”

So basically, if Take-Two doesn’t come out swinging with a premium price point, GTA VI’s grand(theft)iosity will make everyone else look bad, and then they won’t be able to ask players for more money upfront either.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, a man of principles, has been cagey on the matter of GTA VI’s price.

“Consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery,” he said at IICON (via IGN). “How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.”

Admittedly, there are arguments in favor of raising the price of triple-A games. Despite trudging upward over the years, games’ prices have increased relatively little compared to inflation—even as budgets have ballooned.

“If you look at it through that lens [of inflation], that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Zelnick said. “But that isn’t the lens through which we look. Instead, we look at … how do we deliver something amazing, and how do we make sure that what people pay for it feels very reasonable.”

It’s worth noting that big publishers, including Take-Two, have found numerous other ways to nickel and dime players with microtransactions, gacha mechanics, and the like, to the point that many games now release for free. The real elephant in the room, as readers of this site are well aware by now, is mismanagement—feckless leadership running projects off the rails and making actual creatives pay for it, all while personally pocketing millions of dollars.

Also, everything is expensive as hell now, and nobody wants to spend $80 on video games. Grand Theft Auto Online has proven to have an immensely long tail, pulling in around $10 million per week over a decade after launch according to recent leaks. Raising GTA VI’s barrier to entry might stop it from transforming into a similarly ubiquitous cash cow, especially considering how much the video game industry—now an amalgam of Roblox, Fortnite, Steam, and what remains of the console market—has changed since GTA V’s launch. Regardless, GTA VI needs to sell a lot. Speaking to Bloomberg, Zelnick suggested that 10 million units—a total most developers can only dream of—would be disastrous for the decade-in-development crime epic.

Lastly, neither here nor there, but just a few years ago, Bank of America was ordered to pay $250 million for “double charging insufficient fund fees, withholding reward bonuses, and opening accounts without customers' knowledge or permission,” according to NPR. Oh, and we’re talking about a bank that literally charges you for being poor. This is not a scrupulous institution! Perhaps we should not listen to what it has to say about anything, least of all video games.