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If you spend $80 of your hard-earned income on a physical edition of Grand Theft Auto VI<\/em>, you’ll receive a box with a code inside. The box is your standard rectangular, disc-holding shape, but the game itself doesn’t come on a disc\u00a0\u2014 or two\u00a0\u2014 at all. Perhaps the physical part is the warm feeling you get when you manually type the code into your PS5 or Xbox Series X? It surely can’t just be referencing the box, right?<\/p>\n Anyway, at least the physical edition doesn’t cost any more than the digital version, which is already raising eyebrows at $80. This isn’t an unheard-of price point in today’s market, but it is a shock to players who are\u00a0still getting used to the $70 standard for AAA games. Nintendo has been at the forefront of the more-than-$70 movement, pricing\u00a0Mario Kart World<\/em>\u00a0at $80 in 2025 and following that up with Elden Ring<\/em>\u00a0heading to Switch 2 this August. Xbox also teased an increase to $80 for its first-party games in 2025, but it backtracked just a few months later. (Classic Xbox).<\/p>\n The writing has been on the wall for a while now, but Rockstar pricing the standard edition of\u00a0GTA VI<\/em>\u00a0at $80 feels like a turning point.\u00a0The doors were cracked, but now they’re wide open, and the wave of $80 AAA games can start flooding in.\u00a0<\/p>\n This matters because it affects players’ budgets at a time when the cost of living is rising at a torturous rate \u2014 but don’t worry, if you look at it from a holistic perspective, it gets worse. On a grand scale, the $80 price point matters because we’re simply spending more to own nothing. The GTA VI<\/em> physical edition is the clearest, most tangible example of this trend.<\/p>\n I’ve said it before, but about 10 years ago, it feels like we all kind of forgot that DRM sucked. Digital rights management drew heavy consumer ire in the 2000s, as publishers started adding always-on authentication requirements to major new releases like BioShock<\/em>, Mass Effect<\/em> and Assassin’s Creed 2\u00a0<\/em>in the name of fighting piracy. Some publishers even developed their own stores to ensure every copy of Half-Life 2<\/em> was activated and official.\u00a0Many titles had to regularly connect with the publisher’s servers while in use, a feature that generated major glitches and sometimes rendered games unplayable.\u00a0Players felt like they didn’t actually own their purchased games, and there was broad pushback against DRM with awareness campaigns, petitions and lawsuits.<\/p>\n But then broadband and wireless infrastructure expanded, downloads became more common than discs, and the number of games coming out each week skyrocketed, particularly on Steam. Players needed places to purchase and store their growing backlogs, download speeds increased, and the market leaned into convenience. And here we are today: Valve owns your entire\u00a0Steam library and is simply letting you access it, and the same goes for most game downloads on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo platforms. Online games can be shaken up\u00a0or taken down\u00a0by their rights holders at any moment, and even\u00a0AAA single-player narrative experiences come with day-one patches and critical\u00a0post-launch updates. In a digital-first world, DRM reigns supreme.<\/p>\n So when Rockstar prices\u00a0GTA VI<\/em>\u00a0at $80 and calls a game box with a code inside a “physical edition,” it feels like, yeah, the joke’s on us.\u00a0Not only does the physical edition not include any discs, but it’s also spiking prices on a whole line of products \u2014 AAA games \u2014 that players can’t own and don’t control.<\/p>\n The GTA VI<\/em> physical edition is\u00a0what it looks like when game ownership disappears. It isn’t a new trend, but combined with the upgraded price point, the code-in-a-box brings this phenomenon into supreme clarity. Purchasing any ultra-hyped AAA game feels like a gamble (or, maybe a loot box).<\/p>\n This hasn’t been happening in a vacuum, of course. Consumer protections are on the rise in the video game space, alongside efforts to preserve the industry’s history. The grassroots Stop Killing Games movement has been loudly advocating against publishers that remove titles from players’ libraries and haphazardly shut down their services. Stop Killing Games recently failed to convince the European Commission to require publishers to maintain support for games that they’ve stopped selling, but the group is generating conversation and change on a large scale.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the GOG storefront remains completely free of DRM, and in 2024 GOG launched its Preservation Program aimed at adapting historic games for modern hardware. The program has spit-shined and preserved 300 classic games so far, including Metro 2033<\/em>,\u00a0The Witcher<\/em> and its sequel, Devil May Cry: HD Collection<\/em>, Resident Evil 1<\/em>–3<\/em>, six Tomb Raider installments, Diablo<\/em> and\u00a0Crysis<\/em>. All of the preservation work is handled by GOG, with no upkeep required from the original game makers. And of course,\u00a0itch.io is another storefront that doesn’t have built-in DRM like Steam.<\/p>\n The $80 GTA VI<\/em> physical edition \u2014 without any physical media \u2014 is exactly what we should expect from the existing AAA machine. It’s a matter of Rockstar playing its part in the video game ecosystem: perpetuating crunch-layoff cycles, raising the baseline price of all AAA games, and further solidifying strict DRM control structures that benefit publishers over players. Rock on, I\u00a0guess.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n If you spend $80 of your hard-earned income on a physical edition of Grand Theft Auto VI, you’ll receive a box with a code inside….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-gadgets-reviews","wpcat-32-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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