Grand Theft Auto 6 is, hands-down, the most-anticipated game of the generation. With a release date scheduled for later this year,GTA 6 will soon be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series with a PC port presumed to release in 2027. However, we currently have no idea how much it will cost.
While publisher Take-Two has not confirmed any pricing for the upcoming open-world game, or its online component, some have claimed that the game could cost upwards of $100. This would mark the first video game to charge $100 for its base version since the shift to optical media in the 1990s.
In a recent discussion at video game conference licon, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explained that the game will charge less than its actual value. Of course, the CEO didn’t mention what they perceive the actual value of the upcoming video game to be.
“Consumers pay for the value that you bring to them,” the CEO said, adding the publisher’s “ob is to charge way, way, way less of the value delivery”. For a game as big as GTA, Zelnick explained that the customer needs to feel great about investing in a game, which is likely even more important for a game that may last a decade.
“How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for,” the CEO continued. “Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.”
While Zelnick did not confirm what the GTA 6 price will actually be, the CEO said that the game must be “reasonable” alongside its contemporaries. Addressing the current market price of $60 and $70 games, the CEO admitted that pricing “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense” due to how much games cost to create, but a new Grand Theft Auto will always be an outlier.
“If you look at it through that lens, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” the publishing boss 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”.
Zelnick explained that GTA 6 will be “the most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth, in history”, but he’s still “terrified” of the game’s release. After all, Take-Two’s investors are all betting on the game being one of the biggest entertainment launches of the decade, and Zelnick admits that’s a “pretty daunting challenge” for the company.
As Grand theft Auto 6 gets closer tor release, Take-Two is prepping to start the game’s marketing push over the summer. While the entire world knows about the upcoming game, Zenlick explained that it’s important to spend on marketing to make sure fans know the studio is confident about its release.
“I think there’s a difference between awareness and energy, and we need to create the energy,” Zelnick said. “We do have the awareness, the anticipation is huge, it’s bigger than ever before, but in our business you do have to tell people what’s coming and our consumers wanna know that this is gonna be great and they wanna see what the visuals look like.”
