Console price hikes and GTA VI: Korean game companies face a rough second half
Korean publishers are shifting to consoles — right as the hardware gets more expensive
Korean game companies have spent years perfecting mobile games, but growth there is slowing. Their answer, reports Korean business broadcaster MTN Money Today: push into the global PC and console market. The numbers back the shift — the share of Korean players who game on console has climbed by more than 10 percentage points in three years (MTN). But the timing is brutal, and MTN's report, published on July 31, lays out the two forces squeezing the industry in the second half of 2026: hardware prices going up, and GTA VI taking over the calendar.
The price hikes, according to MTN
MTN visited a console store in Yongsan, Seoul, where shoppers were testing machines under a growing cloud: the major platform holders have all announced price increases. Sony raised the PS5 by 200,000 won (about $150) back in May. Nintendo's Switch 2 goes up 110,000 won (roughly $80) from September — MTN's footage shows sold-out signs at stores as buyers rushed to beat the increase. And Microsoft's global Xbox pricing rises by up to $150, starting the day after the report aired (MTN).
The common cause, MTN explains, is the AI boom. Semiconductor production is being redirected toward AI chips, pushing up the cost of the components that go into game consoles. The result is a market where entering the console business costs more than it did a year ago — for companies and for players alike.
GTA VI, the second headwind
The second problem has a name: GTA VI. MTN notes that when the year's most anticipated game arrives in November, the risk is that player attention and spending concentrate on a single title. Korean publishers have big releases of their own planned for the second half — NCSoft's Cinder City, Netmarble's Evilbane, Kakao Games' ArcheAge Chronicles — and none of them wants to launch inside Rockstar's blast radius.
The analyst quoted by MTN, game consultant Han Ji-hoon, expects studios to keep adjusting their windows, deploying releases ahead of or behind GTA VI to avoid the crowd of players glued to Vice City. It is the same pattern seen across the global industry — publishers scrambling around the November 19 date — but MTN's report frames it from a specifically Korean perspective: a domestic industry betting its future on PC and console, just as the two biggest forces in gaming economics (component costs and Rockstar's launch) push in the opposite direction.
What to make of it
Two of the three price increases in MTN's report are official, announced moves (Sony's PS5 hike since May, Nintendo's Switch 2 hike from September). The Xbox figure — up to $150, effective from early August — is reported by MTN and should be treated as a broadcast claim rather than an official Microsoft statement at the time of writing. The GTA VI release date itself, November 19, has been confirmed by Rockstar, but the article's framing of how Korean publishers will react to it remains analysis and expectation, not a confirmed strategy.
The bigger picture is hard to miss though: GTA VI is now big enough to bend hardware economics and release calendars at the same time. For Korean studios betting their next chapter on consoles, the second half of 2026 is shaping up as the most expensive possible time to do it.
Update — 2026-09-01 (BizWatch)
Korean business outlet BizWatch adds another layer to the same picture in a report published July 3 and picked up again this week: GTA VI marks the return of the series 13 years after GTA V (September 2013), with the console launch confirmed for November 19, and the franchise's scale — GTA V alone has sold over 225 million copies, the series over 450 million — is why the industry expects it to absorb most of the market's end-of-year demand (BizWatch). The report names the Korean open-world challengers now positioned in GTA VI's blast radius: Pearl Abyss' Crimson Desert, Neowiz' Lies of P on consoles, NCSoft's Cinder City and Time Takers, and Kakao Games' ArcheAge Chronicles and God Save Birmingham (BizWatch).
BizWatch also spells out the strategy taking shape: industry sources say studios are weighing whether to move releases before or after the GTA VI window — one insider noting that players loyal to GTA will likely spend on GTA VI first and keep their wallets closed for other games, which is why overlapping launch windows are being avoided (BizWatch). There is a silver lining, though: the console adoption that GTA VI will drive could become an opportunity. According to the Korea Creative Content Agency's 2025 survey, console usage among Korean players reached 28.6% (up 1.9 points year-on-year) and PC gaming 58.1% (up 4.3 points) — and since Korean studios' console sales are overwhelmingly foreign, a bigger installed base could reshape that structure (BizWatch). Lee Seung-hoon, a professor of game content at Anyang University, argues in the report that studios should seize the moment by renewing their existing IPs to stay competitive, predicting that Korean games with distinct identities in GTA-like genres could appear within two to three years (BizWatch). These figures and quotes come from BizWatch's reporting and are treated as such — the core conclusion matches the MTN analysis above: expect Korean publishers to dodge November 19, and to bet on the console wave it will create.