One of the biggest talking points surrounding Rockstar’s upcoming open-world game GTA 6 is how much it will cost, and now the top boss at Rockstar’s owner Take-Two has weighed in.
Speaking at iicon this week in Las Vegas, Strauss Zelnick suggested the game will have a “reasonable” price, but he did not say exactly what it will be.
“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, as reported by IGN. “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.”
Big new games have been priced at $70 for years, but Nintendo upped the ante in 2025 by charging $80 for Mario Kart World. Some wonder if Rockstar will opt to price GTA 6 above $70 to capitalize on the enormous hype behind it.
For his part, Zelnick said major new releases have actually come down in price over the years when you consider how inflation has affected pretty much everything else you buy these days. Games have held steady in the $60-$70 range for 10 years, and that “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Zelnick said.
“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,” he said.
Games not going up in price is causing major issues for the AAA game market, and it helps to explain why publishers push DLC and microtransactions so much to help cover the costs of ballooning budgets, according to experts and industry veterans.
Zelnick admitted he is “terrified” by the question of how Take-Two will measure success for a game like GTA 6, which has more hype than any other game in the history of video games. Its predecessor, GTA 5, has sold more than 225 million copies, and that doesn’t even cover the revenue that GTA Online has brought in over the years.
Zelnick said Rockstar is trying to make GTA 6 the “most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth, in history, and it’s a pretty daunting challenge.” But if Rockstar can pull it off, “the upside will take care of itself,” he said, referencing the revenue that Take-Two will make from it.
Also in the interview, Zelnick joked that he believes “a lot of people will be calling in sick on November 19” to play GTA 6 and that the game’s promised marketing push will begin “soon.”
GTA 6 will launch on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Fans have been waiting a long time, as the game was originally set for release in Fall 2025 before being delayed to May 2026 and then again to November.
