GTA 6 NEWS · GAME PRICING
Kingdom Come Co-Founder Hopes GTA 6 “Blazes a Trail” to Higher Game Prices
Locals, here’s a confession you don’t hear every day: a studio co-founder has openly admitted he wants to charge you more money — and he’s rooting for GTA 6 to make it possible. Martin Klíma, co-founder of Kingdom Come: Deliverance studio Warhorse, told PC Gamer he hopes Rockstar’s blockbuster “will blaze the trail” that lets the rest of the industry raise prices. And the kicker: he has zero interest in actually playing it.
The quotes come from PC Gamer’s wide-ranging interview with Klíma marking Warhorse’s 15th birthday, and they’re refreshingly honest about a calculation most executives keep to themselves. Here’s the full picture, and why a $80 game you already pre-ordered is suddenly an industry-wide test case.
What Happened: “Hopefully, GTA Will Blaze the Trail”
Klíma’s argument is simple and bleak. Games keep getting more expensive to make, and the industry has run out of new revenue to pay for it. “The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price,” he told PC Gamer. “That would help a lot, but everybody’s scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost.”
In his telling, Rockstar and Take-Two are “the only ones who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games, which I think is long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive. So I wish them all the luck.” No hedge, no “we’re committed to value” PR polish — just a developer saying out loud that he’s waiting for GTA 6 to absorb the backlash on everyone’s behalf.
The Diagnosis: Games Are “Too Cheap” and the Money Ran Out
Why the urgency? Klíma walks through the industry’s shrinking options. Audience growth is essentially maxed out. Digital marketplaces already squeezed retail for everything it had — his phrasing: “We destroyed retail, and we took all their money.” The pandemic’s “artificial demand” faded, leaving executives who overextended during the boom to force others to pay the price through layoffs and studio closures. Meanwhile, computing power keeps climbing, and gamers expect the scale and complexity of new games to climb with it.
If you can’t grow the audience, can’t re-monetize retail, and can’t magic up new revenue streams, the unit price is the last lever left. That’s the whole thesis — and GTA 6, the one release guaranteed to sell tens of millions of copies regardless of price tag, is the one game strong enough to pull it.
How We Got to $70 in the First Place
Some quick history for why “everybody’s scared to death.” The $60 standard held for roughly fifteen years before Take-Two itself — of all companies — was among the first publishers to push flagship titles to $70 at the start of this console generation, with the rest of the industry following within a couple of years. Each step up came with a wave of player anger, inflation coverage and quiet eventual acceptance. That’s the pattern Klíma is describing: everyone can see the next tier exists, but nobody outside Rockstar’s weight class wants to be the one who tests whether the audience will tolerate it. GTA 6 removes that risk by making the question moot — tens of millions of people are buying it at whatever price is printed on the box.
And Klíma speaks from the cheap side of the ledger. Warhorse built Kingdom Come: Deliverance and this year’s critically adored sequel on budgets a fraction of Rockstar’s, operating out of Czechia where, as he and his colleagues have noted before, development costs run far below the US and Western Europe. If a studio that efficient says the math doesn’t work without higher unit prices, that’s a stronger signal than the same claim from a company burning billions on one game.
The Best Part: Klíma Isn’t Even a GTA Fan
The interview’s most quotable stretch has nothing to do with economics. Klíma says the Grand Theft Auto series “doesn’t appeal to me at all,” and he doesn’t get the hype either: “I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I’m somehow forced to. And the reason why it is so popular — it beats me. It’s something which I just fail to understand.”
He’s quick to add he bears no ill will toward Rockstar — he thinks “it’s really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels,” and he genuinely hopes GTA 6 lives up to its hype. A rival developer cheering for a game he’ll never touch, purely because its success might keep his own studio’s lights on, might be the most honest thing said about this launch window.
The $80 Trail Already Exists
Here’s the thing: the trail Klíma is hoping for is already being blazed. Bank of America analyst Omar Dessouky argued back in May that GTA 6 should retail for $80, saying it’s “in Take-Two’s self-interest to raise the price point for the entire industry” — Kotaku and IGN covered the note at the time. Then Take-Two confirmed in June that GTA 6 launches at $80, ten bucks above the standard big-budget price, with a significant chunk of exclusive content locked behind the pricier Ultimate Edition — effectively a $100 game, as PC Gamer notes, with pre-orders reportedly skewing toward the premium tier.
We’ve already seen where some of that pricing ambition ends up: the $400 collector’s box that doesn’t include the game, the fan backlash that followed, and the industry-wide trend it exemplifies. PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk suspects Klíma is going to get his wish either way — once GTA 6 price normalization sets in, expect “quite a few more expensive games in 2027 and beyond.”
What This Means for GTA 6
GTA 6 was always going to be a cultural event; Klíma’s interview is a reminder it’s also a market experiment. If an $80 base price (with $100-plus premium tiers) sells through at record pace, every major publisher gets cover to move their next big release up a price tier — and developers like Warhorse, whose historically grounded RPGs operate on a fraction of Rockstar’s budget, are openly counting on it. If it stumbles, the industry’s “last lever” gets pinned back down for another generation.
For players, nothing changes today: GTA 6 still launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the editions are what they are. If you’re in, you can pre-order GTA 6 for PS5 on Amazon or grab the Xbox Series X|S version here — our pre-order guide sorts out which edition is worth it. And if you’d rather watch the pricing dominoes fall from a safe distance, these games will scratch the GTA itch for now.
One developer who’ll never play it, wishing it luck anyway, because its price tag might save his studio. Only GTA 6 does this.
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Related reading: The $400 box and the horrible trend it belongs to · Why fans revolted over the collector’s box price · Everything in the Goodtime State box · The full GTA 6 pre-order guide · The PS5 vs Xbox pre-order split · Things to do while you wait