My first encounter with a “Grand Theft Auto” game was way back in 1999 with “GTA 2” at, of all places, my pastor’s house. The church patriarch would often host the youth group at his home, which meant taking turns on the first-gen PlayStation, but we were cackling a little too loudly as we carjacked vehicles and used them to run over cops. The adults, hearing our incessant laughter, came into the room, instantly became horrified and confiscated the game. To this day, I have no idea how the pastor’s son obtained a copy of this crime spree simulator, but I still find it hilarious.
I would never have imagined, nearly three decades later, that the Grand Theft Auto series would become the cultural juggernaut it is today. While “Grand Theft Auto V,” released in 2013, cost a record-breaking $265 million to make, its upcoming sequel “Grand Theft Auto VI” is sure to exceed any video game budget in history. It has cost an estimated $1 to $2 billion to develop so far, though verified figures aren’t readily available. This sort of project makes Hollywood look small. The most expensive movie ever created, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” was just $533 million.
When “GTA VI” finally launches on November 19, 2026, after so many years of delays that it became a meme, it will likely be the biggest game release in history, just like “GTA V” before it. The game set the standard for both open-world and live-service games and, more than a decade after release, continues to rank among the industry’s most-played games. The update is massively anticipated by virtually any metric.
But it comes at a time of such tumult for the gaming industry as a whole, one in which open-world games are arguably tired and online multiplayer games with $200 million budgets can crash and burn the moment they are launched. Darker forces are at play in the industry, as inflated costs, mass layoffs, the good old concept of ens**ttification and the AI tech bubble threaten to transform what gaming even means.
That isn’t as cringy as it sounds. This isn’t a hobby that is dominated by unwashed deviant boys anymore. The medium has expanded far beyond fantasies of larceny, murder and car theft. Games have become second lives to people, about collaboration, puzzle solving, community and identity. Which makes it all the more frustrating how much influence remains in the hands of the stereotypical angry gamers — the angsty, vengeful critics who think the biggest problem in gaming is Gamergate harassment targets like Anita Sarkeesian, not the late-stage capitalist constriction of the market — and yet angry bros still seem to be running the show. “GTA VI” isn’t even out yet, but it’s already setting the tone, and that may not be a good thing.
Xbox is imploding
Watching Microsoft gut Xbox this month has been a stepping-on-a-rake moment, to say the least. The tech giant that owns properties like the “Call of Duty” and “Skyrim” series recently laid off 3,200 Xbox employees and announced further cuts to 20% of its staff by the end of the financial year. The company is undergoing major restructuring, with rumors that future consoles may simply be PC-like devices that launch Steam.
Darker forces are at play in the industry, as inflated costs, mass layoffs, the good old concept of ens**ttification and the AI tech bubble threaten to transform what gaming even means.
That’s a major loss for a brand that was synonymous with gaming in the 2000s the way Nintendo was in the ’90s. Xbox had “Halo,” “Gears of War,” “Modern Warfare,” and “The Elder Scrolls” to make it a household name. Now it doesn’t really have any exclusive or defining titles, yet Microsoft spent billions scooping up IPs with nothing to show for it.
Why is Xbox struggling so badly now? It could be that its consoles have inscrutable names. I never bothered to really learn the difference between the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S or the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X and I gather that a lot of other people didn’t either. Its most recent consoles have sold only a quarter of what the Xbox 360 did. Or it could be that Xbox couldn’t get enough buy-in to its streaming service, Xbox Game Pass. Maybe turning video games into Netflix isn’t a good idea, though that seems to be working for PlayStation. Customers clearly aren’t fans of what is arguably a reflection of Microsoft’s business practices as a whole. That isn’t to say Microsoft isn’t raking in cash: the company’s most recent earnings report tallies nearly $32 billion in net income in the last fiscal year.
Sony tightens its grip and ditches the physical
The internet is in an uproar over an announcement by Sony, the owner of PlayStation, to stop selling physical game discs by 2028 and release everything digitally. This isn’t just bad news for people who want to get ripped off selling their old games to GameStop or finding a deal on eBay — it deeply undermines what game ownership means and erodes consumer freedom.
This was made crystal clear by Sony’s announcement, not long afterward, that the company would delete 550 movies from customers’ accounts — after they already paid for them — as a result of a nixed deal with movie distributor StudioCanal. Titles like “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” will just disappear from users’ libraries. Sony has pulled similar moves before: in 2023, the company deleted over 1,000 seasons of Discovery TV shows customers had purchased due to content licensing arrangements.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Sony could do the same with games, which is already prompting lawsuits in protest of its decision to cancel physical releases. According to some analysts, Sony is unlikely to change its mind about any of this. And why would they? Digital sales make up a greater chunk of its profits every year, something like 85%, and it’s clear a digital-only environment is something Sony wants very badly, given the way they’ve pushed their PlayStation Plus service every year, necessary to play online or use cloud saves. Though higher subscription tiers offer some pretty decent perks, like access to a rotating game catalog, unsurprisingly, Sony jacks up the price of this service every year. Future hikes are anticipated, and with Xbox moving out of the picture, their efforts to monopolize the market seem likely to be rewarded and they’ll simply weather the complaints.
“GTA VI” may normalize expensive games and crush the industry as a result
“GTA VI” is such a big release that it’s scaring off other studios from releasing their own games around the same time in November, lest they crash and burn because everyone is spending their cash on Rockstar’s latest. That price point is a big deal for some. It’s $80 for the base game and $100 for the “ultimate” version, which comes with a bunch of cosmetic items. But “GTA VI” isn’t really getting a physical release. There will be a box at some stores, yes, but it contains a download code, not a disc. That means there are no resales or returns. You aren’t paying for the game; you’re renting it. Some retailers have protested and promised not to stock the code-in-a-box until it comes with something tangible.
Still, people seem to be rushing to scoop these preorders up, despite the insistence by some that preorders should be avoided given the disastrous launches of games like “Cyberpunk 2077” and “No Man’s Sky.” In general, these moves by Rockstar might prove enormously successful, reinforcing some of these problematic trends. It may just seem like typical capitalist extraction, but the end result will likely be a narrower industry that squeezes creatives and makes things a lot more miserable for players.
Initiatives like the Stop Killing Games movement may serve as a sort of antidote. A few years ago, Ubisoft announced they were shutting down “The Crew,” a 2014 racing game that requires a constant internet connection despite being mainly a single-player game. In response, gamers came together and launched a series of petitions called Stop Killing Games. The goal was to require video game publishers to keep games playable or at least in a reasonably functioning state even after the company had moved on.
In mid-June, the European Union refused to adopt the Stop Killing Games initiative, despite it accumulating 1.3 million verified signatures, and instead will try to coax companies to follow a voluntary code of conduct for managing games’ life cycles. But the fight isn’t over. It comes down to whether gamers have enough awareness to stick up for their rights, or they want an industry that offers less choice at a higher cost.
Read more
about video games