…and the thing is, we were already fine with the eighty dollars. That is the
part that bothers us most. Rockstar put the number up on 24 June, $79.99 for
the Standard Edition and $99.99 for Ultimate, as
Forbes
reported within the hour, and the collective reaction from the lot of us was a
sort of relieved exhale. Oh good, not a hundred. We had spent two years being
softened up for a hundred, so eighty landed like a kindness. It is not a
kindness. It is a price.
Then came the second line of the announcement, the one that actually matters.
The physical version of Grand Theft Auto VI, in Rockstar’s own wording,
contains a download code inside the box. No disc.
VGC
confirmed there will be no disc version at launch at all, and Take-Two went so
far as to deny a report that a boxed disc would follow soon after. So the
thing on the shelf at Smyths on 12 November is a plastic case with a bit of
card in it, sold at the same $79.99 as the digital version, and it exists
mainly so you can “pre-load” from a piece of cardboard. (We have read that
sentence back four times and it still sounds like a prank.)
This is confirmed. The price is confirmed, the code-in-box is confirmed, the
19 November date is confirmed. What is only reported, and we want to be
straight about that, is the scale of the retail fallout.
GamingBible
ran a “boycotted by major retailers” headline, but the retailers actually
named were two independents, Loot Box Gaming in the US, who said they would
not be supporting the release, and Video Games Plus, whose standing policy is
not to carry console products that are just a code.
GamesRadar
covered the same two. Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, GAME, Currys: all still
listing it, and
TechRadar
reports the boxed version is a top seller anyway. So “retailers pulling
preorders” is two shops with a spine, not an industry revolt. Credit to the
two shops. Everyone else took the money.
Which brings us to the bit that will outlast the launch week.
We grew up buying discs. One of us has a very specific memory of a Saturday in
2004, Vice City Stories was not out yet, it was San Andreas, double disc on
PS2 in the UK, bought with birthday money from a GAME that no longer exists in
a shopping centre that mostly no longer exists either. The disc went in, the
game was ours, and nothing on earth could take it back, not a server shutdown,
not a storefront delisting, not a company deciding a decade later that the
licence for a radio station had lapsed and quietly yanking a version. (They
did that to GTA 4’s soundtrack, remember, and the disc copies kept playing.)
We are not saying discs were magic. They scratched, they got lent to a mate
and never returned, the load times were grim. But the object was the
ownership, and the object was the proof. Twenty-two years on, the biggest game
launch in the history of the medium ships with the proof removed and the price
raised, and the market’s answer was to buy more of it. That is the precedent.
Not “GTA 6 is expensive”, because GTA 6 was always going to be expensive. The
precedent is that the box no longer has to contain anything and nobody will
punish you for it.
Strauss Zelnick’s defence, via
TechRadar, is that Take-Two’s business is “well over 90% digital” now, which is true
and also entirely beside the point, because the people who wanted a disc were
the remaining ten percent, and you cannot tell them they do not count while
also selling them a box.
And the eighty becomes the floor. It always does. Nintendo tested $80 with
Mario Kart World and took a kicking for it, Microsoft flinched on a couple of
first-party prices last year, and the whole industry was waiting for Rockstar
to go first so they could point at it. Now they can. Expect the next Call of
Duty, the next Assassin’s Creed, the next Battlefield to quietly arrive at
$79.99 with a straight face, because the one game with a genuine excuse has
made the number normal. Rockstar can argue they earn it. Most of the people
copying the number cannot.
Who loses? Not Rockstar, obviously. Not the chains, who sell cardboard at disc
margins. The two independents lose. Anyone on a disc-drive PS5 who bought the
drive for this loses. Secondhand buyers lose, because a redeemed code has no
resale value, and the kid who would have picked this up used for twenty quid
in 2028 loses most of all, except he will never know it, because he will never
have had the thing to lose.
Caveat, because we owe one: we have both preordered it.
Digital, obviously. Saved ourselves the trip to the shop for the empty box.
Still annoyed, though.
Ultimate Edition, if you are wondering, is another twenty dollars for some
cars and access to in-game shops, which
Forbes
says most fans are buying anyway. So that is the real price. Hundred dollars,
no disc, see you on the 19th.
