Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed during the company's February 2026 earnings call that Rockstar's launch marketing for GTA 6 would begin this summer. He was unusually candid about it, too, noting that even acknowledging the existence of "marketing beats" was "a huge departure" from what he usually says.
For Take-Two's May 2026 earnings call to include meaningful fiscal year 2027 revenue projections, pre-orders would ideally need to be live before or around that call. Revenue forecasts for a game expected to generate $3 billion in its first year need more than wishlists to back them up. They need actual orders, creating a financial incentive for Rockstar to open pre-orders before summer even begins, or at least in the early days of it.
With that said, the moment pre-orders go live, one question that has been festering for months will finally get an answer: how much does GTA 6 cost?
Loaded, the digital key reseller formerly known as CDKeys, recently listed the Xbox Series X/S version at £89.99, a figure that translates to roughly $99.99 in the US. The site also briefly displayed an even higher number, $124.19, before the listing was adjusted. Both figures are almost certainly placeholders, but they tapped directly into the pricing anxiety that has surrounded GTA 6 since former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden first suggested in 2020 that games could eventually reach $100.
To be fair, there are reasons to think the standard edition will land at or near $70. Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, who we recently interviewed by the way, addressed the $100 speculation directly in a January 2026 interview, saying, "Rockstar haven't said anything about $100. This is just something that the internet has decided." His reasoning? Rockstar will want to maximize the player base for the next Grand Theft Auto Online, and selling the next GTA game for "cheap" is the way to go.
Still, the fact that Rockstar has allowed this question to linger without clarification is a choice. When you don't tell people what something costs, they fill the vacuum. A key reseller listing shouldn't be news, but the fact that it does says everything about the information black hole Rockstar has maintained.
Interestingly, this backend update arrives at a moment when the GTA 6 information cycle has been defined by everything except official communication from Rockstar. Insiders have gone quiet after reports that the studio is using deliberate misinformation to identify leakers. AI-generated fake leaks continue to circulate weekly. Fans are analyzing trailer intervals with the precision of astrophysicists tracking orbital decay. And through all of it, Rockstar has said nothing essentially since November 2025.
The appearance of title IDs in the PlayStation database won't change that dynamic. Rockstar will speak when Rockstar decides to speak. But for a community that has spent the better part of four months staring at a store page that does nothing, the knowledge that something is now happening behind that page is the closest thing to momentum we've had since the second delay was confirmed.
Whether pre-orders open this week, next month, or sometime this summer alongside Trailer 3, Rockstar is at the very least building the infrastructure for it. The gears are finally moving for a game that has been delayed twice, produced under conditions that led to mass firings and union disputes, and kept under a level of secrecy that borders on paranoia.
