There's no doubt that GTA 6 will attract an absolutely massive audience when it launches on November 19 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. According to Circana's Matt Piscatella, though, a lot of casual gamers may be in for a rude awakening when they head to the store to buy one of those consoles and the game in six months' time. Speaking to The Game Business show, he said:
Those folks who don't pay a lot of attention that have heard, okay, well GTA 6 is coming, but they're not really keyed in. That's a lot of people, you know. "Oh, GTA 6 is coming out in November". People show up and they go oh, man, GTA 6 is finally out, I'm going to go pick one up.... $1,000 console. Like, there's going to be that price shock for a lot of people. And yeah, I said $1,000 because I've just already assumed we're going to get more price increases. I hope we don't. I'm not saying we will, but it's possible.
Indeed, GTA 5 sold 225 million units to date, whereas the combined install base of PS5 and XSS|X is believed to be around 123-126 million (93 million of which are PS5s). That means there's a non-trivial number of casual gamers who are just waiting for GTA 6 to hop on to the current generation of console hardware, and they might balk if there's yet another price increase, engendered by the current economic climate and memory shortages.
Talking about the recent PS5 price increase that raised the base model with a disc drive to $650, Piscatella said there was an immediate impact on demand for PS5 hardware, though he admitted it could just be some demand being pulled forward.
The analyst then mentioned that there's still not much margin on them, even though they're not sold at a loss anymore. But the more worrying statement concerned the US audience's shift toward higher-income households. Piscatella stated:
We're now well over half of video game hardware buyers are $100,000-plus household income level. And the average price of a piece of hardware has gone from like $250 in 2019, and now we're probably going to exceed $500 just a few years later. So all the dynamics of the console market have really changed quite dramatically in these last few years. And we're really now... it's no longer like a mass market video game device. It's a video game device targeted to high-income households. So it's a whole different economic picture.
It's a great point: consoles were conceived specifically as affordable gaming devices, and with the latest price hikes (today, Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 2, though that has nothing to do with GTA 6), they are rapidly exiting that consumer segment.
Piscatella also underlines the even greater potential issue faced by next-generation consoles like PS6 and Xbox's Project Helix: if they're really going to cost $1,000 or even $1,200, then the install base will dramatically shrink, and the burden of recouping AAA game development costs will be impossible to bear unless those games are available on multiple platforms rather than just one.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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