It is one of the biggest questions facing the video game industry right now: how much will Grand Theft Auto 6 cost? Rockstar Games and parent company Take-Two have so far given little away, save for saying they want to offer great value and that games haven’t really gone up in price over the years. Well, now a new party has waded in: Bank of America.
According to Seeking Alpha, Omar Dessouky, of BofA Global Research, came away from last week’s iicon conference (which IGN attended) with a firm recommendation: GTA 6 should be $80, $10 more than the norm.
Analyst opinions on the GTA 6 price are all over the place, with some saying Rockstar should stick with $70, others saying it could easily justify going up to $100, depending on what the company does with the next iteration of GTA Online. GTA 6 is on course to be the biggest entertainment launch of all time, selling tens of millions of copies on day one. It will, undoubtedly, change the video game industry forever, not just in terms of how financially successful a video game can be, but in terms of how much video games should cost going forward.
And it was this latter point that Dessouky touched on in his comment, saying that if GTA 6 were to cost $70, video game companies would no longer be able to get away with charging more than that for their games. That would put pressure on the likes of Nintendo, for example, which charges $80 for Mario Kart World.
"We also heard from attendees that the industry, which is perceived as struggling, would have difficulty selling games for $80 if GTA 6 came out at $70,” Dessouky is quoted as saying. “We think it’s in Take-Two's self-interest, as a publisher and partner to many developers, to raise the price point for the entire industry.”
The suggestion here is that Take-Two would be doing the video game industry a favor if it went higher than $70, as if selling GTA 6 at $80 would all of a sudden open the floodgates for all new triple-A video games to cost the same. But will Take-Two actually do that?
As reported by IGN, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told an audience at iicon: “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.”
Zelnick went on to mention that game pricing has actually gotten cheaper over the years, a reference to the fact that major game releases have been priced at $60 or at most $70 for more than a decade, as compared to greater rates of inflation seen in the wider economy.
“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.”
We'll just have to wait until Rockstar kicks off GTA 6 marketing (hopefully with Trailer 3) this summer to find out just how much the game will cost. After a series of delays. GTA 6 is set to launch on November 19, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S only — yes, that’s right, it’s not coming to PC day-one, something Zelnick recently explained.
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.
