Rockstar Games has finally announced the price of GTA 6, while confirming it features a “single-player experience” at launch.
Rockstar said GTA 6 costs $79.99 across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, confirming a $10 jump from the standard $70 we’ve seen this generation. The Ultimate Edition, meanwhile, is $20 more, priced $99.99.
There’s no word yet on any new version of GTA Online, which suggests the existing experience will continue to operate as GTA 6 launches this November.
The price of GTA 6 had been one of the biggest talking points in the video game industry, with some analysts suggesting Rockstar could go as high as $100 for the base game. It hasn't gone quite that far, but by setting a $79.99 price, it may open the floodgates for all new triple-A games to follow suit. Only Nintendo has sold a new game for $80 so far (Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World), with Microsoft backtracking on its own plans to do the same last year.
Preorders for GTA 6 launch at midnight local time on June 25, with the Ultimate Edition and preorder bonuses already detailed. GTA 6 physical copies do not include a disc, Rockstar has confirmed. They're just a code in a box.
Rockstar is finally pulling back the curtain on GTA 6 as it nears launch. Alongside the Ultimate Edition and preorder bonus announcement is a significant GTA 6 screenshot release, showing up more of the game. We also have official GTA 6 cover art, and a fresh look at Vice City.
Discussion of the price of GTA 6 comes amid speculation it may be the most expensive video game ever made, with parent company Take-Two estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far. Earlier this year, Business Insider suggested the eye-watering budget based on industry analyst estimations as part of an interview with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick wouldn’t say how much the company had spent on GTA 6 so far, but did admit “it was expensive.”
To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie's recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Concord's initial development deal was around $200 million, according to a report by Kotaku. In 2023, new documents submitted as part of the Xbox Federal Trade Commission case accidentally revealed The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon Forbidden West each cost more than $200 million to develop. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter's life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.
Neither Take-Two nor Rockstar has explained the decision to go to $80 for GTA 6, but as reported by IGN, Zelnick told an audience at iicon recently that “consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery. 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.”
GTA 6 launches on November 19, 2026.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
