// PC GAMER — GAMING
Kingdom Come: Deliverance studio co-founder hopes Grand Theft Auto 6 will 'blaze a trail' to higher game prices
Warhorse co-founder Martin Klima says games keep getting more expensive to make, and that money has to come from somewhere.
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Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima is just putting it out there: He isn't a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and has no interest in playing GTA 6 when it debuts on consoles on November 19. Nonetheless, he's hoping that it's at least as big a hit as everyone expects it to be, for one particular reason: so other studios (like his) can take advantage of the opportunity to increase their prices, a move he believes is necessary for the survival of the industry.
The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price. 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.
The Grand Theft Auto series "doesn't appeal to me at all," Klima told PC Gamer in a recent interview, and not only that, he doesn't understand why everyone else is so gaga over them either. "I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I'm somehow forced to," he continued. "And the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It's something which I just fail to understand."
Klima emphasized that he bears no ill will toward the GTA games or Rockstar, and in fact he thinks "it's really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels." And he hopes that when GTA 6 finally does arrive, it lives up to the hype.
The game industry is facing a big problem, in Klima's estimation. Games are ridiculously expensive to make, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as computing power continues to increase and gamers accordingly expect the complexity and scale of new games to match. But the new revenue streams needed to support those endeavours just aren't there: Audience growth has been more or less maxed out, and digital marketplaces are already providing maximal returns on units sold—as Klima put it, "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money."
The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price. 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.
The Covid-19 pandemic created an "artificial demand" that goosed things for a while, but that's faded away, as evidenced by the subsequent slash-and-burn wrought by industry executives who grossly overextended themselves and are now forcing others to pay the price. So, what's left?
"The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price," Klima said. "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."