£80, £90, £100? How much will Grand Theft Auto 6 cost? We ask the experts ahead of pre-orders opening this week

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to release in November with pre-orders going live this week, on 25th June – an occasion Rockstar announced with a short video revealing GTA 6’s cover art. That teaser alone has already clocked up 10m views on YouTube. To say anticipation is high for the next mainline GTA instalment would be an understatement.

But the question remains of how much Rockstar will charge for the game. Will it push game pricing to new heights? There’s been some suspicious chatter around the topic. Early last year, a report suggested GTA 6 could retail for $100. Then in April, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick discussed GTA 6’s price, not giving us the all important figure, but declaring that the company’s “job is to charge way, way, way less of the value delivery”, so what players are charged is fair for what they get.

Then this week, Portuguese retailer FNAC posted three separate prices for GTA 6 – €89.99, €119.99, and €199.99 – suggesting this is what the standard edition, deluxe edition, and collector’s edition would cost. It has since transpired these figures were provisional placeholders, but it gives an idea of what shops are thinking. A straight conversion of those prices for the UK, incidentally, would be £78, £104 and £173. And those kinds of prices aren’t unheard of in gaming. A new physical copy of Mario Kart World from Nintendo sets you back £74.99, and a collector’s edition of Marathon costs $170 – and that doesn’t even include a game code. Could these be the sorts of prices we’re looking at for GTA 6?

Circana analyst Mat Piscatella tells me those prices are entirely “possible and plausible”, but he also says Rockstar and owner Take-Two are in a position where they could do “just about anything in regard to pricing”. But will consumers accept such a high price? The Game Business’ Chris Dring highlights this exact issue and says most people aren’t “willing” to accept higher prices – for most games. Remember what happened with The Outer Worlds 2, which once had an $80 price tag but was quickly readjusted to $70? Then again, and as Dring points out: “GTA 6 is not most games”.

“Fans know the value offered by a GTA,” Dring says. “This is a game that will last a long time and will justify that level of cost for a lot of people.” Nevertheless, there is a chance Rockstar will stick with standard industry pricing, and the argument for doing this, Dring adds, is that the game brings significantly more people to consoles, or lapsed players back to consoles, in order to play it. GTA is a series people buy consoles for, Dring says, even with the hardware prices as high as they are. “So making that overall cost more palatable by having a slightly cheaper GTA 6 could be a consideration,” he says.

Rhys Elliott, head analyst at Alinea Analytics, agrees that Rockstar could charge more than £100 for a standard edition of GTA 6, but he doesn’t think Rockstar will, or that it should. “I reckon the base edition lands at £70-£80,” he says, because the more expensive editions will do “the heavy lifting” when it comes to raking the money in. Ampere Analysis’ Piers Harding-Rolls agrees, saying it’s the “mid-tier” edition of GTA 6 that’s “perhaps the most interesting”, because it’ll probably entice people to its higher price by offering early access to the final game. “This is where a significant chunk of pre-order money will be spent as it offers a significant bonus and could land – based on these prices – well above $100,” Harding-Rolls says. “All the talk about a $100 launch price for GTA 6 failed to see the bigger picture that many gamers spend at least that much already to get early access to their favourite games.”

But there’s another factor to consider here, and it’s the enormous earning power not of GTA 6 but GTA Online, the online component of the game which hasn’t been detailed by Rockstar yet but which is expected and was – is – enormously successful for GTA 5. That’s “the real cash cow”, says Rhys Elliott. “Capping GTA 6’s addressable audience at launch to squeeze the base price would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. They’d needlessly be limiting the top of the funnel that feeds the thing that actually prints money for a decade. And let’s not forget there’s a cost-of-living crisis. A higher floor hits exactly the players already feeling the squeeze.”

This ties into a third point: convincing people to move over from GTA 5, which Elliott says has shifted an astronomical 225m copies worldwide and is still going strong, selling “hundreds of thousands” of copies a month, even years after release. “A higher base price raises the switching cost, and that works directly against GTA 5-to-GTA 6 migration,” he says. “The cohort a £100+ price would actually deter isn’t the whole GTA 5 base; plenty of those players are on old hardware and won’t be buying a PS5 game at any price. It’s specifically the players who do have the hardware but are watching their spending. That’s the group you most want to convert, and the group [which] price punishes hardest.”

Like Harding-Rolls, Elliott believes the big money at launch will be made from the higher-priced versions of the game. “You keep the base accessible to protect the funnel, and you let the whales fund the margin at the top. Companies have been having it both ways like this for a while,” he says .”I think they’ll make the right call and price the base edition at £70-£80 in the UK. Rockstar, Strauss Zelnick and co are too smart to go above that.”

Regardless of where the price lands, all agree that we’re approaching what will probably be a landmark moment for console gaming. Matt Piscatella says there’s “record purchase intent” surrounding the game as far as the US market is concerned, and he’s assuming it will lead or be “among the biggest global entertainment launches of all-time”. Harding-Rolls agrees. “It is likely to be the biggest GTA game launch ever,” he says. “Pre-orders will break records as will the launch. It will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time.” It could be, Chris Dring says, “the entertainment event of the century”.