Industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities believes that publisher Take-Two and developer Rockstar might sell the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 for $100. Caught by VGC, Pachter believes that the companies will accomplish this by bundling the single-player part of the game with rewards for the new version of GTA Online.
“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,” said Pachter.
He brought up Activision seeing success with a similar strategy where it rewarded Call of Duty buyers with extra rewards in Warzone as well as Call of Duty Mobile. This led to a rise of 40 percent in sales of mainline Call of Duty games, and Pachter believes that the same strategy can be applied to GTA 6 and GTA Online to raise the game’s price from its expected $70 price tag all the way up to $100.
“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 installment,” he wrote.
“In Activision’s case, the integration led to a 40% 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.”
Interestingly, Pachter’s statements come with the assumption that the only way to buy Grand Theft Auto 6 would be through a bundle that includes GTA Online rewards. While this might end up being the case, we might also see a more reasonable price tag for GTA 6 that doesn’t include bonuses for its online mode.
Back in January, Epyllion analyst Matthew Ball believed that GTA 6 would be the first title to be priced somewhere between $80 and $100. Ball said that this would allow other companies in the industry to also sell their AAA games at similar price points.
Other gaming industry analysts, however, have said that such a hike in price would be completely unnecessary, and might even harm Take-Two and Rockstar more in the long run. Circana’s Mat Piscatella wrote about how a higher price tag would reduce the number of players for GTA 6‘s launch, and that the company would be better off keeping the base game’s price low to “make the funnel as wide as possible.”
“You want to make the funnel as wide as possible, while also optimizing launch $,” he said. “You don’t do this [by] making the base price of a game so high that the funnel narrows. It just makes no sense. At all.”
Piscatella, along with MIDia’s Rhys Elliot also pointed out that major gaming publishers have already had games priced at $100 through collectors edition releases, and even by offering, for instance, early access to games.
“Most huge AAA games already charge $100 (sometimes more) in the first 3-7 days before launch, but they call it ‘early access’ and slap ‘collector’s edition’ in the name,” said Elliot. “Publishers have hijacked collector’s editions as a way to charge more for ‘early access’ – AKA delayed access for those consumers unwilling to pay the markup.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is under development for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game is expected to launch in Fall 2025. There has been no word yet on a PC release of the game.
