Few things get me excited like these big GTA 6 moments, but we need to talk about digital game ownership – and fast

The biggie for me was always the one with the Sabre Turbo. Poised at a crossroads, black with an impossible shine, like an oil slick on tarmac, reflections iridescent. A fool in a red sports car in front, the city surrounding, mountains in the distance. A car coiled up at that intersection like the whole potential of that game’s world was spring-loaded within it, waiting at the ready.

It’s not even one of GTA 6‘s pre-launch screenshots – this was one Rockstar released for the PC and next-gen versions of Grand Theft Auto 5 – but for whatever reason it lodged itself somewhere with me. That image is, in a lot of ways, my GTA 5. The type of picture that becomes a memory before you actually experience it. I’ve never quite known why. I’m not even sure the game itself really ever looked as good as that – not a slight on Rockstar; few games ever do – but for whatever reason, Rockstar seems to know how to make a screenshot sing.

Maybe it’s because GTA has always been an especially visual thing, a game of camera angles and long distances and unusually proportioned mugs framed up close. A series where the protagonist always felt a little like an on looker, like the games were opening themselves up to a voyeur. I’ve written before about the power of Rockstar’s deft camerawork

and I truly believe it – maybe this is just more of that mastery, only in static form.

But anyway, whatever the reason, these big screenshot releases the developer does in the run up to its major launches – as it’s just done again now, with GTA 6 – have become a kind of occasion for me as a result. Call me an apologist, call me a sucker, call me anything you like – all probably valid! – but there are just very few moments in video games that elicit the same burst of anticipation, the same twitch of the curtain before the main event, as a big ol’ pile of screens before a new GTA.

This time I’m still not sure which one’ll be the image to stick. I’m fond of the uncanny surrealism of Brian Heder, leaning out the window of his car in a bulletproof vest and wraparound shades like Dog the Bounty Hunter. And the one with the woman twerking with abandon at a police officer – while on top of the cop car’s trunk – feels like it captures the very specific kind of Floridian seediness Rockstar is going for with GTA 6. And the shots of the vistas and the people – the country dudes and their faces’ incredible character, and also their alligator; the sense of motion with the pack of bikers; the obligatory chopper; the even more obligatory cars. The shots of the Cheetah in particular, a Vice City classic – how many times did I wrap one of those round a lamppost during an illicit game at a mate’s house aged 13? – they have the sauce, no doubt. Look at those little droplets of water dashed across the back of the Cheetah’s roof in one of the shots. Sweat beads in the Miami sun, only visible when you start to zoom in. That’s Rockstar, baby. Lovely.

They’re all lovely, in fact. But I think for now it might be a bit of a curveball: the one to stick with me this time might be Jason on a Kayak, in those Ultimate Edition shots that were just released, his bare back and shoulders braced against the sunset and the waves. A more playful, resort-like world of leisure on the horizon. GTA 6 seems, more than ever for this series, to be intent on getting a little sexy. Dual protagonists Jason and Lucia are positioned as doomed lovers in what we’ve seen so far, including a trailer with a rare example of a genuinely not-gross video game kiss, and shot after shot of dancing bodies entwined. This one feels like another case of it, a bit of service for the thirsty. Confirmed: GTA 6 will have hunks (and also really, really impressive water by the way – look at that stuff). And that sexiness will be incredibly welcome. For all of games’ attempts to be more grown up, few if any in the mainstream have taken a properly adult view of intimacy and actually got that right. It would be appropriate for Rockstar to finally break the ice between its leads. And so here we are: once again, through all the potential and implied scale and little meaningful looks in its characters’ eyes, this studio has got me all worked up over a wave of promotional photos.

For all my fawning though, there is also a bit of a catch this time. The latest round of hype arrives with an adjoining bummer: GTA 6 will cost a lot, at £69.99 here in the UK, which we probably all saw coming and which many feared might be worse. But it’ll also cost a lot as a code in a box, something dubiously still referred to as a “physical edition” but which will not contain a disc. And it’ll cost even more than that for the actual full game, given an entire mission and some stores are locked behind the £89.99 Ultimate Edition from the off. And that full game also comes with a subscription to GTA+ which will auto-renew at £6.99 per month if you don’t cancel it.

I think – and I’m aware I might get pelters for this, but bear with me if you can – the up front price alone is ultimately fine. There is a value for money question in video games that few other mediums have to wrestle with. It’s annoying, and in particular it can confuse the conversation when it comes to actual criticism – you can’t talk about the merits of ‘art’ with any seriousness if you’re doing the talking in terms of ‘value’; these are two distinct concepts – but at times it’s also very much necessary to address it.

These are consumer goods as well as creative works, which, in a way, is the medium’s blessing and curse in one. And so in this case ultimately, as much as I personally hate thinking in quite such reductive terms, GTA 6 is probably going to provide a lot of value, and likewise demand for it is going to be unprecedented. And also, cruci ally, it and so many games like it now will have cost an absolute fortune to make. If we want lavish things – and GTA 6 will surely be nothing if not lavishly made – then we do have to pay for them. One of a billion factors in the industry’s ongoing turmoil has been trying to find a way to make those development numbers add up.

GTA 6 itself might have the baked-in anticipation to make all that sense of risk moot – it is going to make its money back, and then some – but how many other games get these silly games journalists salivating over kayaks just by virtue of releasing a few screenshots? There is an argument – though on behalf of the industry, not the consumer – that some games need to be more expensive. They have been much, much more expensive in the past, adjusted for inflation, after all.

However, that argument would be much easier to make if it came with the guarantee that elements of those games wouldn’t then be closed off behind an additional charge. Or that there wouldn’t be a sense of FOMO to dodge when walking past closed shops in what is explicitly defined here as a “single-player experience”. Or that in spending a lot of money up front, you won’t also need to manage a subscription on top. This is the other half of the coin that adds to the sense of distrust from consumers towards the people who sell video games (often it’s misdirected at the people who make them, i.e. the very talented, typically very underpaid, and very unstably supported developers, and that is incredibly misguided, obviously).

That mistrust as a whole is understandable. Because games publishers either want or need to charge more – the term varies depending on who you ask – but also because, since charging more up front requires moving first in a game of price-setting chicken, that additional charge has found its way into games more surreptitiously. We all know the methods: simple, paid DLC at one entirely above-board end of the spectrum, and all manner of psychologically manipulative, if not downright exploitative practices at the other, that can all get frightfully close to the exact techniques employed by betting firms and casinos.

Rightly or wrongly – and I do think it’s wrongly – much of that we’ve become accustomed to by now. But taking this a step further and removing the disc altogether – and with it, potentially, the sense of true ownership – is a genuine cause for concern. If you’re Rockstar there are understandable incentives here: it scuppers the resale market, which once upon a time was positioned as a real existential threat to developers but which has, now the world has gone largely digital already, since faded away. It probably costs a tiny bit less to produce, though with the numbers thrown around for GTA 6’s development costs and the numbers it’s likely to bring in, I suspect that’s incredibly marginal. And possibly most importantly, knowing Rockstar: it’ll go a fair way to preventing leaks as these boxes are shipped around the world ahead of launch. (Also: if you’re wondering why they’re bothering to even sell a boxed version, that’ll largely be down to keeping physical retail partners happy – and most likely, in business.)

Much of the talk now will shift to the most likely consequences. Is that the end for physical media in games? Will platform holders such as Sony and Xbox eventually move to a Nintendo-like ‘game key card’ model? Are games all going to cost at least a tenner more now?

I would suggest, if you’ll let me offer some unsolicited advice, that we make the conversation about something slightly different. Physical media probably is gone, the same way as it went some time ago for music, film and TV (enthusiasts and collectors aside). And that is, in the right circumstances, not the end of the world. There is convenience and a cost saving to be had with digital, and a reason few people in the world continue to carry a big zip case of CDs in their car or a whole wall of DVDs at home – though it’s nice to have the option of a fancy vinyl or 4K Blu-Ray for the really special ones.

Instead, the question for consumers now should be about ownership. This all gets frightfully difficult when digital games are involved – publishers also need to ensure games don’t get pirated indefinitely, and I’m fine with that because I’m fine with the people who make things I like also getting paid for that. But if there’s a law I could instigate overnight, it wouldn’t be to force all developers to sell every game on a physical disc, but to make it so that if you buy a game digitally, you own that game forever. What must change, now the long-promised death of physical games looks set to finally arrive, is the notion that it’s acceptable to purely buy a license to a game that can be revoked unilaterally at any time.

This idea, that we’re only ever leaseholders in a freeholder system, is a disaster for the consumer. The good news is there are glimmers of understanding around these issues, and that will, in theory, only grow as the generations that grew up online age into positions of power. Even the UK government gets it – finally – with that system, at least when it comes to freeholders and leaseholders of actual property and land, a literally feudal means of operating still currently in effect today. And there have been challenges, made sporadically, to this notion of a digital license elsewhere.

Now is the time to make that a concerted push. It’s fine for games that cost a lot to make and provide you with a vast amount of entertainment to cost a bit more. It’s not the end of the world for them to have recurring online elements that come with an optional charge, though there are ways to do this more or less ethically, and we should pay close attention to those too. But consumers should be entitled to the right to buy something and own it, and that’s something that goes well beyond GTA 6, to video games and really all creative media today.

This isn’t so much about Rockstar or 2K – even if it has taken the shine off this otherwise excessively exciting moment for the hype-pilled like yours truly. They are only doing what any company in their position would do, and have made a decision that ultimately just sits inside a long-established precedent with Steam and console platform holders and the rest. They might, optimistically, even provide exactly that level of ownership, if and when the game comes to PC and it can be bought from Rockstar directly. But regardless, this is now an important moment for game ownership, just as Microsoft’s attempts with the Xbox One were all those years ago. It’s essential that we recognise that, just as we should across every form of media. And ultimately, we should really all be on the same side here. This is what all true artists want anyway: not to own their work in perpetuity and only ever lease it out, but to share it openly with the world.