Rockstar is the latest to join the ranks of publishers currently raising the prices of their respective game subscription services, with GTA+ memberships having just gotten a fairly hefty price hike of up to 40% in some regions.
A GTA+ subscription not only gives Grand Theft Auto Online players some significant advantages in Rockstar’s mammoth online multiplayer sandbox including increased monthly monetary gains, boosted business rates, bonus vehicles, clothing and more but also includes a “rotating roster” of games that members can download and play. Currently that roster is somewhat slim, consisting of just four titles in Red Dead Redemption and the GTA Trilogy on console along with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Liberty City Stories on mobile, but Rockstar has also promised that Bully and L.A. Noire will join the line-up later this year.
Previously, the subscription would set you back $8.95 AUD per month, but that figure has now been bumped up to $11.95 AUD per month, representing a roughly 33% increase in cost. In the US it’s jumped from $5.99 USD to $7.99 USD and in the UK it’s up from £4.99 to £6.99, a jump of around 33% and 40% respectively.
With reports suggesting that the development budget of Grand Theft Auto VI is somewhere in the upper ranges of $1 billion to $2 billion USD, I’m sure those extra few dollars are going to be put to work bringing easily the most anticipated game of our time time to fruition.
Just last week, EA revealed that it had raised the monthly and yearly fee on its own game-library-subscription deal, EA Play. And last year, both Xbox and PlayStation upped the cost of entry to their own, much bigger and more popular game subscriptions, and as the idea of paying a recurring fee to access a library of games becomes more and more entrenched I’m sure this will be far from the last time it happens.
