Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game
As Xbox announces a price hike, the year’s best-reviewed games are all budget titles
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of the year’s top-rated games, costs just $50
Photographer: Kepler InteractiveHi everyone. First, a note on some breaking Friday news. This morning, Rockstar Games announced that it is delaying Grand Theft Auto VI from this fall to May 2026 “to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve.” To industry insiders — and readers of Bloomberg’s Game On — this came as no big surprise. But it still spooked Wall Street, as parent company Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.’s shares plummeted as much as 10% following the news. (Which from my perspective is very silly — what’s the difference between them making a kajillion dollars in the fall and them making a kajillion dollars in May?)
As far as I know, there’s no ulterior motive or juicy mishap behind this delay. It’s a simple explanation: There wasn’t enough time left to finish all of the work that remained. For months now I’ve heard skepticism from Rockstar employees about the viability of that fall 2025 window, although the company continued to insist that it was real. Short of cutting a significant amount of content and mandating overtime — which Rockstar management has been trying very hard not to do, as we’ve previously reported — fall 2025 was never going to happen.
