GTA 6, Steam Machine, Xbox price hikes, and Destiny layoffs herald the end times

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You can’t afford a game console because of the cost of storage. But you must have storage, because now even the biggest game of all time will only be available as a download. The only reason that might be OK is that the industry seems to have lost its grip on how to make games sustainably in the first place.

It’s a shame because, on paper, it should have been an exciting week. The Steam Machine is a genuinely thrilling third way for gaming hardware, and the concept seems to have been well executed by Valve. And there’s no doubt GTA 6 will be a shot in the arm for the flailing industry; it may suck up all the oxygen for a while, but afterward there will be more people interested in games and playing them on newer hardware. True, there’s something fall-of-Rome about the game’s extravagant detail and scale, but it’s hard to look at those new screenshots and not get pumped. It’s clear Rockstar has not lost its gift for style and relevance, for finding a way for a video game to cut through and become a monocultural moment.

I don’t know how many people will be picking up an Xbox Series X to play it on when the console now costs eight hundred dollars, $300 more than its launch price. Gaming’s affordability crisis hasn’t hit game prices as hard as feared — GTA 6‘s $80 sticker price is at the lower end of expectations — but hardware is another matter. Xbox and Valve’s comments on the impact of global memory shortages on their pricing were unusually frank, even annoyed. (This is ironic from Microsoft, which is also frantically building the AI hyperscalers that are causing the issue.) Whatever the cause, these console prices are going to limit GTA 6‘s halo effect on the industry’s flatlining growth.

The RAM crisis is an external factor for the video game industry, but it compounds the mistakes made during the pandemic, which created the illusion of explosive growth when, in fact, the game market was just accelerating hard toward its ceiling. During that period, shortsighted investment capital was pouring in, and companies like Sony took the opportunity to make massive, ill-timed acquisitions like Bungie. Just four years later, the human talent that created the only things of real value in this whole messed-up system are paying the price.

Image: Valve

GTA 6 being sold as a code in a box might seem a trivial issue by comparison, but it’s existential in its own way. It’s not just about where the game data sits, it’s about ownership. A GTA 6 box might look like an object that you own, but it isn’t. It’s just a licence. Nintendo’s Game-Key Cards are better; at least you can sell or lend them. This is nothing short of a disaster for the future of the art form, because there will be no backup copies of one of the most important game releases of all time, and because it sets a colossal precedent. (There’s a ray of hope on this issue, though; unconfirmed but plausible reports suggest the code-in-box move is an anti-leak measure, and a disc release of the game will follow after launch.)

So, we can’t afford to buy game consoles, we can’t own our games, companies can’t afford to keep making them, and games’ future as cultural objects is on shaky ground. This is end times stuff. Is video game culture dying?

No, because you can’t kill an art form. (Just look at theatrical movies, which appear to have survived the one-two punch of the streamer wars and a global pandemic and are having a great year.) But it might have to evolve into a different shape. Gaming’s half-century quest for bigger, better, more — more graphics, more memory, more game — might end with GTA 6. And if it doesn’t, maybe it should.

Plus this:

• Supergirl suggests the James Gunn formula can be replicated: Tasha Robinson finds the DCU finally has an identity of its own — a slightly boring one
• Star Fox can’t outfly an all-time Nintendo classic: Giovanni Colantonio isn’t completely swayed by the remake’s embellishments to Star Fox 64

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