It’s that time of the year again. You know it: day 328 of January, still waiting for that first paycheck to come in, and you’re starting to get a little bored. So, you start evaluating things that went down last year, and you try to think of ways to have a better 2025.
Or, at least, that’s what Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion, has been doing. He just released a 220-page PDF/presentation about The State of Video Gaming in 2025.
The presentation goes over a lot of data, from showing how the decade-long growth spurt of the gaming industry from 2011 to 2021 has hit a decline to how new growth avenues can get the ball rolling again.
This presentation contains a lot of interesting data, so we encourage you to read it and let us know what you think about the state of video gaming in 2025.
However, of the eleven proposed new growth avenues discussed at the end of the presentation, one in particular has the gaming industry in a tiff: the pricing of Rockstars’ highly anticipated GTA VI.
The presentation suggests that game developers are “hoping” that GTA VI will launch somewhere between $80 and $100. This will allow other games in the market to be released at a slightly higher price point—shifting $50 to $60, $60 to $70, and so on.
Ball shows that adjusting for inflation, for GTA VI to release at $70 would make it the cheapest GTA game from the entire franchise.
For the South African market, this suggests that, on launch day, we are likely to see games priced at over R2,000, which for many is simply unobtainable. This is especially true considering gamers are increasingly shifting to services like Game Pass (which has a predicted revenue of $5.5 billion in 2025) or playing the plethora of free-to-play games that are overwhelming the gaming market.
With big title games now taking longer and costing more to produce, this price increase is an obvious choice for publishers, but how will it affect the end user, us gamers?
A quick poll among our readers and staff indicates that most gamers are willing to spend a maximum of around R1,200 for a well-developed game from a studio they know, even if that money is let go with a clenched jaw. Many still comfortably lean towards waiting for a game to experience its first few patch releases and a drop in price before picking it up.
Having said that, one should also consider how much playtime you’ll likely get with a single title. We’ve been spoilt with free-to-play games like Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite, which we’ve been playing for years, and spent our fair share on in-game skins and other add-ons. Even GTA IV still has a massive fan base of gamers who are currently playing the game. While GTA online can be a hit-or-miss experience these days, many gamers are still playing the single-player mode. We should expect the multiplayer experience in GTA VI to be far stronger and arguably game-changing, which means we’ll likely be playing it for many years. Now, all of a sudden, the price of games doesn’t seem so exorbitant – but yes this is based on the title. Rockstar is one of the few publishers who can pull it off.
With GAAS (Games As A Service) like Xbox Game Pass becoming increasingly popular and more and more free-to-play games releasing every month, the industry is left in an awkward conundrum. Do we pay more for hopefully better games, or do we stand together and show the industry that we, as gamers, are not willing to walk the path these publishers want to take us down?
Let us know what you think about more expensive games, GAAS and the state of the industry in the comments below.