GTA 6

Rockstar

While it seems more and more likely that Grand Theft Auto 6 may finally hit its promised release date, November 19, 2026, what hasn’t happened yet is Take-Two or Rockstar committing to a price for the game.

Months ago, there was some debate around whether GTA 6 would stay at the now “standard” $70 price point, or, since it is without a doubt the largest game production ever made, if it would push that higher to $80 or even $100. Now, speaking to iicon, a video game exec conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick commented on the potential price without actually confirming what it’s going to be, despite the fact that it’s now just seven months from launch. Here’s what he said:

“Consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery,” Zelnick said. “How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.”

He goes on to talk about the shift from $60 to $70 games, and how that’s probably still much too cheap due to inflation, and of course, the ballooning budgets of major games. But he’s got a reasonable take on that:

“If you look at it through that lens, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But that isn’t the lens through which we look. Instead, we look at… how do we deliver something amazing, and how do we make sure that what people pay for it feels very reasonable.”

All of this sounds to me like Rockstar is potentially approaching a place of charging $70 for the game, rather than trying to push past that to $80, and certainly not to $100. Almost no games have gone that far, with one notable exception being Mario Kart World, which Nintendo priced at $80, trying to wring more money out of its most popular game series. For a bit, Borderlands 4 seemed to toy with the idea of pricing the game at $80, but it didn’t (that certainly seems like a good thing in hindsight). Microsoft, bizarrely, announced that the smaller-scale Outer Worlds 3 would be $80, but reversed that after consumers were aghast.

The idea is that if any game could do it, it’s GTA 6, but clearly the entire industry, and its players, are not ready to go there. At a $70 price, GTA 6 is still, undoubtedly, going to set every sales record on earth, not just for video games, but for consumer products in general, most likely. And Zelnick seems to imply that’s probably good enough without charging a tax on top of that.

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