As the gaming biz gears up for the dawn of “Grand Theft Auto 6” next year, there’s a growing debate about pricing strategies for premium titles.
Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writer for TV and gaming, explains on the latest episode of “Daily Variety” podcast that $80 has become a flashpoint for the industry. Nintendo raised the bar earlier this year with the release of its “Mario Kart World” game. Microsoft tried to follow that lead but wound up cutting the price for “The Outer Worlds 2” back to the $70 benchmark that has been the standard for high-end titles for about five years.
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“There’s continued conversation surrounding pricing of games, what people are willing to pay for games, what’s a fair price for games based on the amount of time put into making it,” Maas explains. In her recent interview with Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick, she pressed him on the pricing question for the most anticipated game release in years, “Grand Theft Auto 6,” set to debut in May.
Take-Two is keeping those details under wraps for now. But if ever there was a title that would support a higher pricetag, “GTA 6” is it. The anticipation is enormous and growing as it’s been more than 10 years since “GTA 5” was first released.
“For something like ‘GTA 6,’ they could certainly charge $80, but they could charge more than that and people will still pay it because this game is going to be so big,” Maas observes.
Maas also weighs in on a larger question: Why is “Grand Theft Auto” so popular? For one, it was one of the first games to breakthrough with casual game players as an entertainment experience that was not to be missed.
“There’s a lot of millennial nostalgia there. There’s a lot of Gen X nostalgia there. It was one of the first like big games that got a lot of people into it, depending on how young you were at the time,” Maas says. For many fans, “GTA” was “the first game where it felt like, OK, it’s not a sports game. It’s not a fighter. It’s this other thing. It creates an immersive world. And what you could do in ‘GTA’ was very different from the traditional ‘Zelda’ or ‘Mario’ or playing a sports game. It was this other thing and this other product that probably drew in people who weren’t traditional gamers, because the concept of the game on its own was interesting to them.”
Also in the episode, Emily Longeretta, Variety‘s senior TV features editor, gives listeners a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how Variety‘s annual Emmy Extra Edition issues are assembled.
“My best friend is an Excel doc and Word doc,” Longeretta says of the process of organizing coverage by show, by award category and discipline and genre.
Variety will publish a total of five standalone Extra Editions devoted to the Emmy Awards this month: Actor (Aug. 7), Actress (Aug. 11), Comedy (Aug. 14), Drama (Aug. 18) and Reality/Documentaries/Game Show (Aug. 19). Prior to this year’s Emmy nominations announcement on July 15, we published no less than eight standalone Emmy Extra Editions.
After the nominations are out, the playing field narrows and the lobbying for coverage during the voting period intensifies. Only someone who loves TV as much as Longeretta would thrive on this tough editing assignment.
“It’s not lobbying for the huge stars. It’s the lobbying for the supporting actors who got their first nomination ever,” Longeretta observes. “What I love about that it is that so many of the freelancers we work with and with the staff that we have, so many people pitch me. ‘Can I talk to him?’ ‘Can I do that?’ And it makes me excited to see people excited about these shows.”
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