GTA 6 Fans Don’t Want to Pay $80 to Pre-order the Game, They Want to Pay More
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Published Aug 11, 2026, 12:07 PM EDT
Fans are willing to pay a premium for Rockstar's anticipated game
GTA 6's $100 edition is the most pre-ordered, says Take-Two boss
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When it was announced that Grand Theft Auto 6's standard edition would cost $80, some felt that was too high a price even for the most anticipated video game of all time. However, it now seems that plenty of people are willing to spend even more than that on Rockstar's open-world adventure as we get closer to release.
In an interview with CNBC, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed that GTA 6's standard edition is not selling equally to the $100 Ultimate Edition. "Actually," Zelnick said, "it is skewing more to the premium edition." While that sounds like great news for Rockstar and Take-Two, Zelnick is more realistic about what that statistic could reveal about pre-release hype for the game. "That might be a reflection of the fact that the most avid consumers are the ones who are pre-ordering," the executive explained.
Earlier in the interview, Zelnick admitted that while Take-Two had "a great deal of pricing power" with GTA 6, the company wanted the cost to be a relative value. "We understand that a consumer experience is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for it," Zelnick said, continuing that "We would never want people to feel like this is out of my range." This echoes comments from Zelnick during a Take-Two earnings call earlier this week, in which he called GTA 6 an "incredible bargain" at its standard $80 price point.
When asked what players get in the $100 edition of the game, Zelnick simply stated, "Additional content." The official pre-order page for the game details this further. Pre-ordering the Ultimate Edition unlocks a slew of exclusive cosmetics and a free month of GTA+, the subscription service that grants players perks in GTA Online. Throughout the interview, Zelnick reiterated that Take-Two expects GTA 6 to do incredibly well but doesn't want to set expectations too high. In discussing how the game might sell over time, Zelnick referenced the company's track record with GTA 5's historic sales of over 200 million copies since the game's release in 2013. In the context of GTA 6, Zelnick said he'd "never project that to occur again."
GTA 6 will be released Nov. 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.