It's so interesting to me that as a PC gamer, they chose to just .. not let me buy the game. It's not even an option, for any price. I'd have to wait multiple years for them to decide to go for another cash grab and do a PC release. No thanks, I just won't play.
I've never understood this. For most games by the time they release on PC the hype has died down and they get a tiny fraction of the sales they would have gotten with a simultaneous release.
I imagine Sony, at least, would give them a better deal if they launch console-only.
QA for PC must be much more difficult than for 2 consoles, as there's much less variability. So launching for consoles first probably allows an earlier launch.
You can optimize for AMD for the console launch, and then optimize for NVIDIA later.
The most vocal PC gamers are more demanding w.r.t. graphics quality, which requires more time for the PC release.
Excuse my silly question, but what's the point of pre-buying a game, if it will only exists as a downloadable copy. I get you want to gift it for xmas, but for the rest of players? The point of pre-sale is to make sure you will get one when it comes out?
There was a time when pre-sales came with a special box that included a physical map or a mouse pad or some other bit of game merch. I don't think that's true anymore, though.
Though I think there have been some games that let you start playing two or three days earlier.
I personally agree that pre-buying is silly in today's world of digital distribution. But I will point out that most pre-sales now come with a digital item or two or five that's exclusive to pre-orders. Additionally, if you pre-order, you can sometimes download the game a day or so ahead of time, and then have it "unlock" when it's released, allowing you to play at minute 1. I'd wager GTA VI is well over 100 GBs, so this is actually a reasonable benefit, especially considering the potential for CDN crashes at launch time.
That's right. I forgot about the ability to pre-download the game before the official release, which might help the servers. That also remove the joke "Patch day 1 (of the size of the game)" which I always found ridiculous but became a standard practice.
Having the game of that size is the only excuse I accept for not releasing a physical version, but because no blu-ray will handle it, it starts darker days for game preservation. I love the fact that I will be able to undust my old PS4 in a couple of years and play GTA V without relying on the PlayStation Store. But we knew these days were counted.
One reason for doing it is that download servers will be absolutely slammed on release. A pre-order will often times come with the bulk of the download happening a few days in advance, and then a very small download at release that contains a small amount of data that makes the game playable. This is an argument for buying a week out, not 5 months out though.
Another is that there are very often below-RRP deals for games in advance, but if you buy it on launch day you'll be paying RRP.
Generally it doesn't make sense, but in this particular case the servers are going ti be so overloaded with people trying to download it that it might be worth it to preloaded the game. Now of course they're probably going to have separate author servers that will probably also be overloaded with everyone trying to login at once (why does a single player game need you to log in first? good question!) so imo you're probably going to be screwed either way
The benefit for the player is they get a few additional in-game cosmetic unlocks, and the benefit for the publisher is they get a large wad of cash in advance and and an excuse to generate a new hype cycle surrounding the game.
In addition to what the sibling comment wrote, many platforms will let you download the game in advance, and "unlock" immediately at launch. Some people want to be among the first to play, I guess.
Is this after aggressive optimization? Size inflation for AAA games has truly reached new heights. If it had to be released via physical media that would require 3-4 BD discs at minimum.
I've been on a retro gaming binge lately because I strongly believe the constraints & limitations of older platforms yielded a better product imo.
It is just speculation at this point, no official numbers yet. Some leaks have suggested a size about that, and it seems to be in-part corroborated by the physical editions being download codes.
Over a decade of development and an estimated budget between $1-2 Billion, I am okay with paying ten bucks more. There are significantly lesser games selling for full retail.
>Over a decade of development and an estimated budget between $1-2 Billion, I am okay with paying ten bucks more.
I don't balance my checkbook based on what other people spend, and presuming that those things have anything to do with perceived quality is a fools' errand with the multitude of counter examples one can bring up of AAA flops.
>lesser games
this thing isn't even out yet.
how many examples of over-produced and under-delivered expensive garbage in film, media, video games & art do we need to produce until people disconnect the two concepts of quality and cost ?
Depends on your gaming tastes. I haven't really enjoyed any of the GTAs for longer than 2 hours, while RDR2 I also stopped playing after about 3 hours out of boredom - and similar to the GTA series, general frustrations involving the controls. Rockstar just doesn't fit my tastes, which is certainly a problem that rests with me
I don’t like Taylor Swift music. My not liking it has no bearing on her obvious talent in the industry. I get people not liking GTA. Ignoring their obvious talent is silly.
That's a lot of green, and your or my opinion on any particular game isn't relevant to the assertion that Rockstar has a stellar track record in making games people seem to love.
It will probably be an unoptimized hot mess for the first year. Same as the rest of the over hyped AAA titles. I'm sure devs are on a death match to hit the deadline.
Some backstory - I like gaming quite a bit - but more of a personal archivalist. I have basically all games I've ever played on physical media and try to keep someway to play them offline - just jailbroke my 360 to be able to play games from HDD incase the DVD drive broke. Anyway...
I saw the no DVD and was initially devastated. I'm in two minds - I saw one post that basically said "it won't contain a DVD at launch".. if I read between the lines, though I'm not sure I see the value incentive for Rockstar, but...
If they hypothetically launched with physical boxes with digital download codes, okay... This would definitely be in the name of re-sellers (as they've stated). But this is the same as piracy, which has always been, not that "we need to stop people from pirating our games for eternity" but "we need to stop people pirates our game for X months after launch", which makes sense (the piracy party).
So, I'm wondering, if they actually begin releasing physical disks (offline, re-sellable, usable in 20 years), say, 6-12 months after releasing the game.. would that work? I mean, for me, assuming it's the equal block-buster to the franchise I adore (in a varying sense), then I might not mind too much to pick up a copy after 6-12 months (I don't care about bleeding edge).. but... would this work? If we assume the first 12M of buyers can't resell, would the people who buy the game after 12M actually bring a great number to the second hand market.. perhaps not?
I really have the idea of having games that I love in physical form that I know it can't be taken away.. similar to reading a book that you end up reading and know you want to come back to anytime in the future.. and this would _suck_ if I couldn't get a copy (and I assume all PC versions would be full of online-only DRM stuff anyway).
The highest capacity blurays available are 128GB and there's a good chance the game is larger than that, so it'd need to be a multi-disc installer.
I used to think physical media was great, but optical discs do have a finite shelf life. DRM-free is the important part, so you can make your own backups (like you're doing with your 360).
Physical media doesn't work when modern games are 100GB or more.
And to answer your question, most consumers don't care. The convenience of being able to buy with a few clicks and download immediately without going to a store or waiting for the mail is far more beneficial to most people than being able to locally archive or replay in 20 years.
PS5 and XBox support Blu-ray discs with capacities up to 100 GB. Both GTA V and GTA IV used multiple discs (there was an installation disc and a play disc). Heck the PC version of GTA V required 7 DVDs:
The bigger difficulty comes from the increasing complexity of games (feature wise) and their release state.
It's effectively impossible to release a "gold version" game to the quality standards of ~1990 physical media, in 2026.
The surface area for potential gameplay bugs is too large: it'd take another decade of QA polish.
So even if you have physical media for the release day version of a game, what can you do with that? Play a buggy version?
To GP's point about post-release physical editions, it makes more sense to sell something later that rolls up the most critical post-release patches and content.
This doesn't track with actual game releases, on the contrary it tends to be smaller/simpler games that release exclusively digitally and the big triple A games continue to release physical discs.
As far as bugs go, the solution for this has been and continues to be that after you install the game from the disc, you download a patch to update it. It's been this way for almost 20 years now (XBox 360 and PS3 both launched with explicit support for this).
> big triple A games continue to release physical discs.
Technically correct, but not really correct. It's hard to think of a game in the last decade where I've inserted a physical disk an been able to play without having to download a giant update first. Sometimes literally impossible - the installer disk isn't a complete game until you download an update
If the game they release on a physical disk is unplayably buggy, do they owe you a refund? Even if online updates make it perfect? They can't require that you play it online unless its not even available physically.
> Physical media doesn't work when modern games are 100GB or more.
This is a totally fair point and literally something I haven't even considered.
> most consumers don't care
I know.. I know.. I mostly commented because the linked article _does_ speak about it and that it implied people weren't happy (mostly for re-sell not for archival purposes). But, yes, I get that
I guess my point is.. if they were really to wait for X months and then start to release physical media (again, I can't see the financial incentive for them to do it), but it would really put a big split between: 1) people that buy that the game and simply want to re-sell it and 2) people that want to buy the game to "last forever" (like myself).
Because most of the people in 1) are _likely_ to be the people wanting to buy at launch, play it and move on, the second are _probably_ more willing to wait (or even (probably) wait and buy a second copy later).
I've been seeing a lot of drama around price increases in games, but I just don't find it to be that bad. I mean, 25 years ago a new game cost $50, and now that huge open worlds are common and the playtime can be in the hundreds of hours, and adjusting for inflation, I don't think $80 is a huge ask.
They say it's $100 for the ultimate edition but really, due to how much stuff they're locking into only that edition (certain shops and stores in game), that's the base edition and the $80 one is the lite edition. It is simply a marketing trick to have a 100 dollar price tag without as much pushback.
It will be very interesting to see if this lives up to the hype and/or if it is able to recoup the enormous amount of money spent developing it. The expectations from everyone seem to be so high; it's a very long way to the bottom if it somehow flops.
Personally, things got a little too realistic for me around the time of GTA IV. The earlier games felt like cartoony fun but I started to feel bad about the stuff I was doing in IV. I tried V a year or two back (I think they've maybe remastered it since?) but it ran so terribly on the Steam Deck that I refunded it.
This feels expensive, but I remember SNES games costing $60 in the 90s. If anything, the cost of videogames has been pretty resistant to inflation, I'd say?
It's being released on November 19th, you need a box so it can go on a shelf in walmart so your relative can buy it, wrap it up and put it under the christmas tree.
No disks large enough probably (100 gig for PS5). And still if they manage to squeeze some form of the game on it, a large day one patch would render it obsolete.
A nice box with artwork like a map and other goodies is still great. I always found those maps useful and aesthetically pleasing.
Having a playable version of a game physically is great and I’d buy a version with some physical storage medium if it ever hits the shelves. Maybe the game needs more time for that. Or a different data carrier.
Edit: added PS5 disk size and preference of a physical game
Also so that it can make the retailer money. The studio might not want to piss off the retailer, which they would do by pulling the physical copy (or selling it at the OEM price directly). There are cases where retailers will de-list some products in retaliation.
What's interesting to me is that game studios have less to loose here than other OEMs. With equipment like shoes, outdoor gear, or cars, having the physical product out in stores does a lot to sell it: you have to try on shoes, driving a car builds attachment, it's also nice to check the build quality of your tent or whatever.
With games, you generally just have to play it / read the reviews, and you can trial it directly at home in a lot of cases.
It is seen constantly with a wide variety of products: the presence and visibility make the sale. You even have boxes that are much larger so that they get more visibility on shelves.
If it didn't have a utility in taking the shelf space they wouldn't bother making them as it'd be a net loss. If it's not a net loss, people must be finding value such products being there as that's where they are choosing to buy them. That could be anything from gifting to collecting to lack of awareness otherwise, but it doesn't really matter what - there's no inherently shit reason for a product to be on the shelf other than if it actually doesn't have demand in that form.
I think it's just that some people really like having a physical object to put in their bookshelf or whatever. I don't personally see the point, but I also don't need any more clutter in my house.
Physical store space, promotional contracts with vendors, special editions, bundles, etc.
I find it very silly, utterly unnecessary, but it is far from unprecedented [0] for this industry. I think it's very problematic for preservation and will only lead to more interest from groups trying to bypass their DRM because of this.
Selling empty useless packaging should be illegal. If they want to use physical chain they should come up with a physical product that has some utility.
I think this is a reasonable compromise. Let's face it - they could have made this a $100 game (or even more) and many people would have bought it. I would have bought it. I'm not sure if it needs to go to Neo-Geo game costs ($200+?) but Rockstar has earned enough of my trust to buy in.
That said, I think I've bought GTA5 two or three times for various platforms over the years. I doubt we'll see GTA6 on sale for years.
As they say in the automotive industry, buy once, cry once. (Pay more for the known good thing, rather than buying the cheap third party things... I'm looking at you, $30 clockspringexperts.com that I have replaced 3 times in the past 4 years... instead of buying the $300 toyota part once)
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