Rockstar said GTA 6 costs $79.99 across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, confirming a $10 jump from the standard $70 we’ve seen this generation. The Ultimate Edition, meanwhile, is $20 more, priced $99.99.
GTA 6 physical copies do not include a disc, Rockstar has confirmed. They’re just a code in a box
On the lack of a physical disc, I’m gonna play devils advocate here and just remind some of you that, while it’s fucking stupid these companies are selling boxes with codes in them, as that is absolutely not a physical release, the days of physical media are over.
Blueray discs max out at around 4Mbp/s write speeds. Meanwhile SSDs can read data at 400-500 MB/s, and NVME Gen 3 alone can do at minimum 1.5 GB/s. The fact is that modern games are just too massive in scale to warrant those slow speeds on disc. Even ignoring the physical constants of Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head, (GTA 6 is guaranteed to be over 100GB) the game is constantly streaming data at rates that those discs just can not feed to the hardware.
I’m personally just sick and tired of people getting up and arms about this, acting like it’s a choice to not bundle games on physical media anymore when there is a genuine physical limitation to this. To clarify I personally believe that these companies and researchers could come up with a newer technology for this. So, it’s not JUST physical limitations. I think Sony and Microsoft, and the various other publishers know that in the long run they save money without having to manufacture physical media, plus digital sales effectively make the used game market extinct. But that takes money and time to develop new technologies. We have flash storage that is 30x faster nowadays. It’s not worth it.
Feel free to ignore my rant. Just had to get this out as I’m sick of seeing misinformation spread that they can absolutely get these games on disc. They can’t.
Oh yeah and the price is ludicrous….even though 99% of people will be buying on launch. This game is gonna sell like hotcakes.
Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head
Single layer BDs are 25GB, but dual-layer BDs are 50GB and released simultaneously in 2006, 2010 introduced triple-layer discs with 100GB capacity, and we’ve had quadruple-layer discs at 125GB since 2018. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a single layer BD, to be honest.
Yes we have quad layer discs but they haven’t sold well, Sony AFAIK is the only manufacturer, and the manufacturing cost is ludicrous. And going back to my previous point, all of that is fucking meaningless when the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash memory storage which is required for most modern AAA titles.
Games haven’t actually been played off of the disc in ages, though. The system typically just uses it for installation to the HDD or SSD and then as a key to allow the user to run the program.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a game do that. I remember during the early 8th gen days they did indeed do that, but from what I recall that practice started to dissolve late that generation. Well after quad layer discs showed up. For standard size blue ray discs like what PS4 uses they’re just not big enough.
Games haven’t streamed from the disc in… I don’t even know how long anymore. The game installs from the disc onto your console for the actual playing.
But the fact that the data is on disc means that I can install it now, or in five years, or in ten years, even after they may have shut down servers or removed it from stores making only the more expensive re release available, etc.
And games have released on multiple discs for decades when necessary.
I can also resell a physical disc. I can let my friend borrow my physical disc. I can continue to play my physical disc on a new account if mine is banned, corrupted, hacked, whatever. I cannot do those things with a redemption code.
I understand what you’re saying, and yes hypothetically they could put the games on multiple discs to transfer over to your hard drive. But ignoring the manufacturing costs, you’re still limited to the read/write speeds of those disc drives. Transferring data from disc to hard drive is a little faster but not by much. Even if the game is at minimum 100GB, and assuming 30GB per disc hypothetically, that’s about 3 discs….it would take literal hours to transfer the game over to the console. Versus most people with decent internet simply downloading it directly, around 2-3 hours hypothetically. Sometimes even less than that if you have 800mb/s internet which is extremely common nowadays.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if the games were smaller in size, as history as shown. But they’re just too damn big now. And quite honestly from a consumer perspective I think the industry has shown nobody wants to go back to owning multiple discs/physical media for a single product. I’m old enough to remember needing multiple floppies to install certain games. I don’t miss that. Not to mention you HAVE to be there to babysit it so when the data finishes copying over, you have to remove the disc, put disc 2 in, etc. I don’t miss that, consumers have shown they don’t miss that.
So I understand the sentiment and I do miss owning physical media. I’m happy there is a movement going on for collecting. I myself have multiple 4k movies and media on disc. I wish more research would go into developing new technologies so we can bring that back. For gaming though, it’s just not viable with current technology.
Edit: Yes quad layer blueray exists but the manufacturing costs for that are ludicrous, they don’t sell well so there’s no insensitive, and regardless you’re limited to the abysmal speeds of optical media drives.
Quite a few consumers are showing in response to GTA 6 that they do in fact want a physical disc. Regardless of if they have to babysit its installation. A small tradeoff I am happy to make.
Also, PS5 discs can have up to 100GB on them, not 30. You’re off by a factor of three.
Also, physical disc means no worrying about internets data caps.
I wasn’t arguing against physical media itself. Simply having to carry multiple discs for a single game. The MAJORITY of people don’t want that. And even on the subject of there being demand for a physical disc of GTA 6, you really think the flame wars on the internet represent the majority of consumers? History has shown time and time again the internet, or congregated groups like Reddit do not represent the vast majority of consumers. If this was such a huge problem in the industry, people wouldn’t continue to buy digital media, or continue to spend money on microtransactions.
You are correct that they have multi layer discs now to handle those storage constraints and that was my mistake, but the fact is that the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash storage. Modern AAA games are DESIGNED around them because of the large scale. Even hypothetically if you put GTA 6 on a quad layer disc the damn thing wouldn’t run due to having to stream high resolution assets on the fly in real time at sub 100 MB/s speeds.
I mean……come on man. You can’t even argue against that. It’s just fact. We need a successor to optical media to accomplish that. We have nothing AFAIK.
Again, games haven’t steamed from disc in years. AAA games are not hindered by disc speed. The disc is used to install the game, and then the game is played from drive as if you had downloaded it anyway. You seem to have a few misunderstanding regarding this tech.
I’m also definitely not claiming that our little corner of the internet is representative of consumers at large. Sorry that I gave off that impression.
However, I also think it’s worth mentioning that what consumers at large want is frankly rarely relevant. Companies have been driving the trends, rather than the other way around, for a looooong time now. Like, before I was born.
No misunderstanding. My point stands that standard blueray discs on PS4/PS5 as an example do not use quad layer discs, and they’re too small to hold 80GB+ AAA media like most games are nowadays.
I completely understand the difference between streaming from disc and transferring to hard storage. Both are true at the same time. I haven’t seen a single, large AAA game transfer from disc to SSD this generation. Ever piece of physical AAA games I’ve owned from 2020 onward has had a code built into the box. I also haven’t seen a game stream from disc since late 7th generation.
If my arguments were all over the place and incoherent I apologize. I’m not good at debates. But to be clear I fully understand the difference.
No PC release means I’ll play it when it goes on sale for $15 a few years from now. I’d pay full price if it launched on PC but I’m not going to reward Rockstar for this shitty “we know you’ll buy it twice” game they play.
Good thing I don’t give a single fuck about getting this on release, or multiplayer, or any of the nonsense here. I’ll wait you out Rockstar, and hope the rest of the gaming community is finally tired of your shit.
Lol im not paying a cent over $20 for it
It was a slippery slope letting the industry upgrade the prices of AAA games to $70.
Can’t be surprised that its $80, but still appalling.
You will own nothing and you will pay twice as much for it
From my (PC) point of view GTA 6 comes in 2028 then. OK. I’ll wait. I have waited 30 years for VR to arrive, I can wait 2 years for GTA 6, big whoop.
You know the industry has gone downhill when they have to reiterate that it includes a “single-player experience” at launch.
I always thought Grand Theft Auto VI would have a single-player mode, but I guess some people focus more on multiplayer.
To be fair, GTAV online made them magnitudes more money than the initial single player price. It’d help if simps would stop paying real money for fake money to buy digital cars and boats and such.
Between September and April, they made $12 million per day on GTA Online. 70% came from PS players!
I’m personally not interested in the multiplayer, but some people really are. I think it’s good for Rockstar to clarify that it won’t have multiplayer at launch. I don’t think that is a commentary on the state of the industry; I think it’s good communication from the devs in fact. I’m really quite surprised by how much people have honed in on that specific wording as a negative.
This is where everyone complains about the price and then goes out and buys it anyway, letting the industry know they can price gouge us.
The older I get, the more comfortable I am ignoring the hype and just waiting for something to go on sale. I’ll wait years now. I don’t care. Lots of other games.
I was pretty excited for Dead Island 2. Ended up waiting and waiting and then I got it for free from Epic. Worked out pretty well for me.
I’m also a PC gamer, so I won’t even get the opportunity to play GTA6 for another year or two after it comes out on console.
This might be the first mainline GTA to NOT outsell the previous GTA
Would be pretty wild but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
230m copies is an insane bar to clear, even for this juggernaut. I’m sure Rockstar’s expecting some headwinds on the price, but nothing major.
This won’t come to PC and will most certainly have the most invasive anti cheat possible. Hard pass
And it certainly won’t work on Linux. A big no from me.
For GTA5, the single player works on Linux even though their anti cheat prevents playing the multiplayer.
Website details the game actually blocks off stuff if you don’t buy the most expensive version
They are insane if they do that.
Blocking stuff off means, what though? Any game with 2 editions and a difference in content can be seen as glass half full or half empty: the higher edition “adds content to the lower edition”, or the lower edition “blocks content from the higher edition.” Usually the missing content is vehicles, guns, skins, costumes, etc.
But if they’re blocking parts of the map, or he story, then that’s a whole different beast.
It’s guns, cars, and cosmetics, of which there will be plenty in $80 version. The one part that’s hard to evaluate is that the larger edition has more “businesses”. An educated guess is that it’s the real estate minigame from Vice City, and there are a few properties that are only in the more expensive edition, but that’s only a guess. It doesn’t sound like whole storylines are locked off.
Found IGN’s list of things and that sounds about right.
I’m going to do the same thing I did with GTAV: wait ten years and get it for free on Epic or whatever.
I wonder if you still have to tap X to run like it’s 2002. At least default that shit to the Tears of the Kingdom style where you just hold the button.
Gut feeling is this is gonna run like crap on base PS5. Downscaled to 1080p, 60 fps if we’re lucky. Same thing happened with crimson desert.
I’d buy it on PC if I was able to but I am certainly not getting a ps5 pro just for this. I’m hesitant to even consider the PS6 in a few years without a TV that can do HDMI 2.1
Rockstar has a pretty good track record with console optimization, for what it’s worth.
The only game I wanted to own a console for, and that was only due to wanting to play at release. But I never got a PS5 and they’re much more expensive now, have to wait again. Or get a used PS5. And no disc is a crock of shit of course.
I’m already sick of this of this games shit
I was going to buy it in ~5 years on PC for the single player campaign…
But if they’re describing it as a “single player experience” it’s going to be a shitty offshoot of multiplayer instead of a ring campaign that has a multiplayer slapped on.
It sounds like a minor difference, but it means the entire “experience” is just reskinned multiplayer and will push people there so they spend money.
This one will likely be bad
Where are you getting that it’s an offshoot of the mulitplayer? We’ve seen the cinematic trailers and such by now. There are written characters, and you’re not just playing as the create-a-character “John Auto”. I think they’re just saying it’s a single player experience so that people looking for GTA Online know that it won’t be there at launch.
cinematic trailers are just lies… they are never true representations of the game. they are afterall, CINEMATIC…
the word experience, implies it’s NOT single player… but you can experience what single player could have been, if they gave a shit.
gta5 already proved they don’t give a single fick about customers, or single player.
companies use words for specific reasons… to mislead, deceive and lie to you. they make you think A, when Infact they are delivering 🖕
There’s a big difference between “this cut-scene shows something cooler than what I can do when I’m in control” and “extrapolating the word ‘experience’ out to mean that anything single player is going to be half-assed”.
and you’re not just playing as the create-a-character “John Auto”.
Not a fan of GTA 3, eh?
I think canonically his name ended up being Claude? But no, I mean the way GTA Online does its missions is that every NPC will talk to you, but your character is silent. And no create-a-character system outputs characters that look as good as the protagonists of GTA 6, where they have human actors as the reference models and performance capture.
I think he’s been Claude Speed even back in GTA 2. My point was that “Claude Speed” is practically the same name as “John Auto”.
Oh, I went with John Auto because whenever there’s a Street Fighter trailer with the generic create-a-fighter for World Tour mode, people call that guy John Street Fighter. We definitely haven’t seen create-a-characters up to this point.
GTA Online has introduced many characters and campaigns. It just doesn’t center around a specific voiced protagonist, or hold any kind of long-term writing stakes. It’s possible some of those cinematics come from their online missions as a result.
Lots of live service games have made that effort; apparently even Fortnite builds some semblance of “story” to justify each battle pass? (I don’t play it so I’m not sure)
Sure, but we know exactly who the protagonists are. It’s the Bonnie and Clyde dynamic. It’s a single player campaign. This isn’t a guess; we know this. Even if they hadn’t said this publicly, we knew this from leaks from years ago.
Part of my point is that we don’t know how much of its implied expansive story is actually singleplayer. A game with three singleplayer tutorials missions that end with “Now play multiplayer!” can likely make a cinematic story-based trailer based around key protagonists, and advertise “A singleplayer experience”; Battlefield has basically done this several times.
I certainly hope it leans towards a complete singleplayer, but the past decade of GTA Online makes me worried otherwise.
I very strongly believe the wording is just there to let you know that GTA Online won’t be available at launch, much like with RDR2 and GTAV. I’m actually surprised so many people are reading it any other way.
But if they’re describing it as a “single player experience” it’s going to be a shitty offshoot of multiplayer instead of a ring campaign that has a multiplayer slapped on.
This is a massive stretch with zero evidence…
You could have asked me to fill in the missing steps you’re having trouble filling in…
That would have resulted in you gaining understanding about this specifically, and how people use logic and critical thinking in general.
That’s crazy man, instead you did that, and now I’ll never see an actual question you ask me.
Haha, what kind of asinine comment is this?
I think you should do some self-reflecting and look into solving your issues before lashing out at other people
Same thing man.
You could have asked why I think it’s obvious the single player will just be a hamstring multiplayer, and I’d have explained it.
Would’ve been so easy
Yes, I could have, but I honestly don’t care about your opinion and you don’t seem like a nice person to talk to.
I don’t know what’s going on in your life but hopefully you’re just having a bad moment.
You could have asked me to fill in the missing steps you’re having trouble filling in…
Dude, come on, you say completely unsubstantiated bullshit on here all the time. It isn’t their job to ask you to explore your stupid, baseless, bullshit claim.
(In fact, you can’t see this right now because you’ve told me you’ve blocked me for debunking your paper-thin, vibes-based bullshit in the past. So I for example couldn’t ask if I wanted. lmao)
Wow
It’s like this every time a new GTA comes out.
Nope. Started around after Vice City
Hahaha
I get it, but…it’s gonna be a banger. Rockstar may be a terrible place to work, but they make good games. GTAV and RDR2 are among my favorite game experiences.
I just wish it were releasing for PC at the same time.
Oh that was NEVER going to happen. They found out with GTA V and RDR2 that they can triple dip on sales at full price by staggering releases and upgrades. Rockstar will never release everything at the same time again.
They found out with GTA V and RDR2…
Not to be pedantic, but Rockstar have always staggered their PC ports all the way back to GTA III. Their strategy is literally 25+ years old at this point and I don’t see it changing.
Never say never. The console landscape has changed dramatically since both of those games came out. PC took a lot of market share, and the console install base at the time of GTA V’s release was way higher than it is now.
Never say never.
Rockstar only loses money by releasing both at the same time. PC-only gamers will wait to get it on PC, but the gamers that also have consoles and don’t want to wait will buy it on console, and then buy it again on PC when that releases in roughly a year (just like GTA V and RDR2). It was never launching on PC at the same time as consoles, the chances of that were 0% after Rockstar saw the multiple millions of dollars in extra sales they got thanks to those staggered releases.
The chances get significantly higher when the console player base is smaller and trending down. Investors want to see the biggest entertainment launch in history every time, which is doable when you’re reaching a larger addressable market. The other headwind they’re facing right now is that people on the fence for a PS5 are maybe less inclined to buy one just for GTA now that it’s gotten significant price hikes. Someone impatient who may have been willing to double dip is probably less so.
GTA6 is still going to do gangbusters with exactly this strategy, but the market is changing, and it could affect how things play out in the future.
never… they will never…
used to make good games…
now they make stores and money pits with graphics and mechanics slapped on top.
stop defending these companies who have already proven to not give two fucks about you and want to extort more and more from you.
grow a pair of balls FFS… actually stand up for what’s right and stop caving to your simple mind of, oh but it’s kinda fun
This has some serious “GAMERS RISE UP!!!” energy. It’s a video game, and people on Lemmy need to calm the hell down. Buying games was never about “actually standing up for what’s right”. Get off the high horse.
used to make good games… now they make stores and money pits with graphics and mechanics slapped on top.
Their last game was Red Dead Redemption 2 and it was critically acclaimed and loved. I don’t personally care about GTA 6 but I can see why people would be excited for their next game.
used to make good games…
The last two new games they made were, if I am correct, GTAV and RDR2. The two games I mentioned as having loved. What “used to”?
stop defending these companies who have already proven to not give two fucks about you
Where was I defending anyone? I said I expect the game will be good because the last two they made I loved.
and want to extort more and more from you.
They haven’t gotten a dime from me for anything except game releases, so if you’re trying to complain about GTA Online or Red Dead Online…that ain’t me. As far as I’m concerned, they made products I liked that I paid for. And my guess is the next one will also be something I like.
grow a pair of balls FFS… actually stand up for what’s right
I don’t think falling in line and following your feelings on this topic would be me growing a pair of balls…
and stop caving to your simple mind of, oh but it’s kinda fun
RDR2 was art. That game made me cry. It told a beautiful, tragic story any told it incredibly well. “It’s kinda fun” is hilariously reductive.
But even if it were only kinda fun, it’s a video game. That’s the whole point, right? It’s supposed to be entertaining. It being a piece of art is just the cherry on top.
I didn’t care for RDR2. Too much interactive movie. The endgame was fun but even then there’s goddamn cut scenes for basically every major side quest as well. The main story was so fucking tedious, as there were sections where you had legitimately 50% cut scenes. So that means when you want to pick it up for an hour, you spend 15 minutes doing inventory management shit, 20 minutes of cut scenes, and 20 minutes of actual gameplay. If felt almost impossible to play if you didn’t have 3+ hour chunks to dedicate to it.
I’m sorry, but I’ll die on this mountain - game stories are just never very good. They feel special because you’re a participant, but they’d be be c tier made for TV movies without that context. Tons of games used to tell stories within the gameplay just fine. I think resorting to lengthy cut scenes to move the narrative is honestly just lazy.
