And ahead of the big release, expected to be in the autumn of 2025, gaming insiders are explaining what they think the latest instalment from Rockstar will cost us.
Anticipation for the product is growing after Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive confirmed in February that there is currently no delay for the game, with an autumn release now twice confirmed by Take-Two.
September looks off the cards due to the release of Borderlands 4, another one of Take-Two’s releases scheduled for the autumn. And with the company saying it won’t go head-to-head internally with its products, it makes an October in to November timeframe look a lot more realistic.
With that pre-Christmas release now looking as concrete as it ever has done, industry experts have been looking at how much GTA 6 might cost us.
Bad news. Michael Pachter, the managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, has said we could be looking at an unprecedented price point of ‘$100 (£80) or more’.
Lucia will be the main protagonist in GTA 6 (Rockstar)
It follows in the footsteps of Matthew Ball, a venture capitalise and analyst, who produced a 220 slide report on the gaming industry in late 2024. In it, he said a $100 price tag for GTA 6 could be on the cards – and that it could be a good thing.
On the $100 or more price tag, Pachter this week said: ‘We think the company has plans to sell the game at a previously unheard of price point, and suspect that management can offer consumers an incentive to pay $100 or more per unit by rewarding them with a large amount of in-game currency to be spent in GTA Online.
“There is precedent for integrating an online game experience with a premium game, as Activision did so with both Call of Duty Warzone and Call of Duty Mobile content prior to the release of its annual Call of Duty premium instalment.”
GTA 6 is expected to land on shelves in the autumn (Rockstar)
Pachter continued: “In Activision’s case, the integration led to a 40 percent increase in sales of Call of Duty premium; in Take-Two’s case, we think a successful integration of GTA Online and GTA VI can lead to a $100 price point for the premium game.”
Take-Two has a history of being the first to jump when it comes to raising the general price of games, with 2020’s NBA 2K21 being the first game of the current generation to be priced at $70 (£50 in the UK).
Rockstar has remained tight-lipped on GTA 6 ever since the first trailer dropped in December 2023 (Rockstar)
As Matthew Ball said in his analysis, such a move to $100 with GTA 6 could be a way to ‘enable the rest of the market to move up too’ and stop trends in recent years of large layoffs in the gaming industry.
Would you pay $100? We suspect hardcore gamers wouldn’t even think twice about handing over that cash.
Fans aren’t convinced Rockstar would raise the price to such an amount, taking to Reddit to say it risks ‘reducing their potential player base’.
“GTA 6 will cost 70 bucks and Rockstar will spend the next decade making billions off GTA 6 Online,” one fan said.
With rumours of Rockstar turning GTA 6 into a product similar to Fortnite with creators able to add to the product, it would be somewhat of a rogue move to alienate people who might be able to contribute to that and therefore the longer-term playability of the product.
