GTA 6 is priced at $79.99, not $100. Some Take Two shareholders are reportedly disappointed, believing Rockstar left hundreds of millions in revenue on the table across projected tens of millions of copies sold.
While Take-Two Interactive saw its stock price shoot up over the past month as the build-up for Grand Theft Auto 6 reached its current peak with the pre-order reveal, it definitely appears like some investors weren't too pleased with the company's decision to sell the next Grand Theft Auto for "only" $80. TTWO shares are currently holding steady, with a slight dip rather than another marked increase.
According to Yahoo Finance, TTWO shareholders are reportedly disappointed that the GTA 6 base game didn't sell for the feared $100, and we can only imagine that they weren't satisfied that there isn't a more significantly expensive bundle like with NBA 2K26 either.
To a player, $80 for a game is already a lot. To a shareholder looking at the most anticipated game in history, every dollar not charged is potential profit walked away from, multiplied across tens of millions of copies. It isn't just a rounding error to them.
GTA 6 Price TTWO Revenue Impact
| Base Price | Revenue on 40M Copies | Difference vs $80 |
|---|---|---|
$79.99 (actual) | ~$3.2 billion | Baseline |
$89.99 | ~$3.6 billion | +$400 million |
$99.99 | ~$4.0 billion | +$800 million |
If GTA 6 sells 40 million copies, every extra $10 on the base price is roughly another $400 million in revenue.
A lot of people expected GTA 6, as the biggest release around, to be the title that pushed pricing to $90 or $100 and normalized it for everyone else. So when Rockstar settled on $79.99, it surprised people who assumed GTA 6 would break the price ceiling after Nintendo did it first with $80 titles alongside the launch of Nintendo Switch 2.
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To be fair, the shareholders are not wrong that Rockstar could have charged more. GTA 6 has demand so overwhelming that a $90 or $100 base price probably would not have dented sales much. People who waited 13 years would have bought it regardless. From a pure revenue-extraction view, leaving the price at $80 genuinely is money not collected. However, pricing the base game at $80 may be the smarter long-game move, even from a money perspective.
For starters, it fosters goodwill, and by making the Ultimate Edition only just $20 more expensive, along with controversial exclusive bonus content, Rockstar stands to make a lot of money from what's essentially just a slightly pricier digital code. Besides, since the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online and subsequent success, it's become an open secret that much of the money the franchise will make going forward will come from the online multiplayer.
Granted, Rockstar is marketing GTA 6 as a single-player title, and the next iteration of GTA Online is nowhere to be seen, but make no mistake, it's coming.
A slightly lower base price that maximizes the player base can easily out-earn a higher price that scares off a slice of buyers. Rockstar likely knows this better than any quarterly-focused shareholder. The $80 that relieved players right now may quietly make Take-Two more money in the end than the $100 some investors wanted.
With that said, TTWO shareholders have other reasons to worry about GTA 6 ahead of its launch on November 19. Retailers have already begun making their opinion known and launching online petitions about the lack of a physical launch. It's come to a point that employees at GameStop are sharing stories of people canceling in-store GTA 6 pre-orders because of this. It'll be interesting to see if TTWO and Rockstar will change their plans if share prices continue to perform below expectations.