Buy a PlayStation, Beat the Market
Unless you’re a PC gamer, you can look forward to playing GTA 6 this year. November 19 is D-Day. It’s hard to believe. I even hesitate to write this, since it has been delayed three times to reach this point. The difference now is that we’re allowed to pre-order, with a price of $119 on Xbox and PlayStation. Promises have been made and money has changed hands. It’s time to return to Vice City, a place in the GTA universe we haven’t had a chance to hang out in since 2002, one year after Grand Theft Auto III came out.
GTA 6 is expected to be a juggernaut for the entertainment industry. Take-Two expects $8 billion in revenue in its next fiscal year thanks to the game. The budget has been whispered to have blown out to $3 billion. Other developers have actively avoided all of GTA’s release dates. I expect November will be a drought for games as everyone gets out of its way.
Physical collectors are left in the lurch, as Rockstar has confirmed that GTA 6’s physical version will not include a disc. That would be an incredibly funny sentence if it weren’t so sad. I was hoping to get a box with three discs in it. Instead, I’m being told my physical copy will not be physical at all. It’ll be a lovingly wrapped box of fresh air and a note telling you to start living in the 21st century.
Data firm Ampere Analysis told The Game Business in 2025 that it believed 700,000 fewer consoles were sold that year because of the GTA 6 delay. It’s not outlandish to believe that this game will be a system seller. Even PC players feeling FOMO might shell out for a console, although they tend to be quite resilient, happy to wait a year for the terrible PC port that eventually gets its kinks ironed out. Unfortunately, there’s never been a worse time to buy a console. There’s a slowly growing axiom that we now live in a time when the cheapest time to buy one is at launch. By September this year, not a single current-generation console will be cheaper than it was at release. In NZ, a Series X has gone from $849 in 2024 to $948 today. Even the decrepit Switch 1 is retailing higher than it did at launch, rising from $548 in 2017 to $589 today. This is the sad reality of the world we live in as component costs soar.
Recently, Valve announced its mini PC, the Steam Machine. Its pre-order announcement was preceded by a lengthy explanation of why the machine had overshot its expected price point, with the cheapest package costing US$1,049.
“The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.
Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.”
Xbox has recently come under new leadership, ending Phil Spencer’s long run. New CEO Asha Sharma increasingly looks like the executive brought in to stop the company bleeding money. She has already begun tightening spending and reshaping the business. Game Pass pricing has also been adjusted, offering at least a small reprieve even as Xbox announces another console price rise.
“Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.”
Microsoft can’t afford to buy components because Microsoft is too busy buying all the components for AI.
If you’re a lapsed gamer thinking about jumping back into the scene, be prepared for sticker shock, or maybe buy a console sooner rather than later. At this rate, you could probably beat the stock market by sitting on a garage full of Xboxes.