{"id":914357,"date":"2026-10-03T06:38:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T06:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/914357\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T06:38:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T06:38:15","slug":"kingdom-come-deliverance-studio-co-founder-expresses-hope-that-gta6-will-drive-up-game-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/914357\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Kingdom Come Deliverance’ Studio Co-Founder Expresses Hope That GTA6 Will Drive Up Game Prices"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the years, a certain subset of video game enthusiasts have enjoyed, let\u2019s say, a complicated relationship with Warhorse Studios, the developers of both Kingdom Come Deliverance and its sequel.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, the games are both good! And Warhouse founder Daniel V\u00e1vra was vocal about Gamergate! \u201cThey only know how to bark at others from behind the fence,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a> in 2014, and \u201chow to play victims when somebody barks back.\u201d Of course, V\u00e1vra could only have been describing the cowardly purveyors of the cynical harassment campaign perpetrated against\u2014oh. Wait. No.<\/p>\n

No, V\u00e1vra was complaining about people writing \u201chysterical, aggressive, manipulative articles\u201d and opining that \u201cthe biggest problem we have [in gaming] is that there is a group of people [who] think \u2026 they have a mission to make the world a better place and protect the oppressed by any means.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year, V\u00e1vra accepted<\/a> an award from Gayming for the KCD2\u2019s gay subplot\u2014still finding time to rail against \u201cforced \u2018woke\u2019 nonsense\u201d in doing so, mind you\u2014and then claimed he was \u201cfed up\u201d with a campaign against KCD2 \u201cfrom a small and vocal minority\u201d because of that plot and its other allegedly \u201cwoke\u201d aspects. Life comes at you fast.<\/p>\n

That said, Warhorse might be about to find that the gamersphere as a whole is somewhat less forgiving than the woke cabal set on destroying gaming. This seek, it was V\u00e1vra\u2019s co-founder Martin Klima who picked up the \u201ctime to make some controversial comments\u201d baton; in an interview<\/a> published on PC Gamer this week, Klima expressed a hope that Grand Theft Auto VI \u201cblaze[s] a trail\u201d for higher game prices. He suggested that of all the industry, it\u2019s Rockstar\/Take Two alone \u201cwho can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Price increases, Klima argued, \u201c[are] long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive.\u201d The problem, he continued, is that \u201ceverybody\u2019s scared to death about it.\u201d However, he said, GTA\u2019s higher price point \u201cwill [hopefully] allow us to increase the cost\u201d\u2014with \u201cus\u201d here being the rest of the game industry.<\/p>\n

And in case he hadn\u2019t pissed enough people off already, Klima also took the time to say that the game he\u2019s hoping will save the industry is, in his opinion, a whole heap of shit: \u201cI am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I\u2019m somehow forced to. And the reason why it is so popular\u2014it beats me. It\u2019s something which I just fail to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has gone down as well as one might expect in the comment section. The thing is, Klima may well be correct. Games cost less now in absolute terms, let alone real terms, than they did when I was buying them in the \u201990s (which is a small consolation for the fact that writing pays less than it did when I was aspiring to it in the \u201990s). Whether a simple price increase will be enough to save an industry whose costs and ambitions headed skyward just as the world\u2019s inclination to pay for anything inclined to the subterranean\u2026 that remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

But the thing is, these are difficult discussions to have, for the same reason that any discussion on the internet is hard to have\u2014because comment sections and social media reward and incentivize invective while flattening nuance, because those forums drive engagement by stoking rage, and because people will respond to \u201c$99 for a game!!!???! Lol ill just pirate it\u201d in exactly the same way as they will \u201clol actually its about ethics in game journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is to say, they\u2019ll do it with a minimum of thought, and even less consideration for any of the actual people involved. Woke games bad\/good (pick your absolutist position), big prices bad\/good (pick your absolutist position), four legs bad\/good (you get the idea). Boy, am I glad it\u2019s Friday.<\/p>\n

*No, it was not about ethics in game journalism. Piss off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the years, a certain subset of video game enthusiasts have enjoyed, let\u2019s say, a complicated relationship with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":914358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,219898,312179,481808,330603,105,481809],"class_list":["post-914357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-gta-6","tag-kingdom-come-deliverance","tag-martin-klima","tag-rockstar","tag-technology","tag-warhorse-studios"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}