The Fnac GTA 6 price leak was almost certainly fake. Mismatched EAN codes and retail insiders confirm Rockstar withholds real pricing until about an hour before reveals.
Over the weekend, a Portuguese Fnac listing leaked apparent Grand Theft Auto VI prices ranging from €89.99 to €199.99, and, at the time, it looked more credible than your usual placeholder listing. We didn't actually confirm it, and we still won't, but all signs pointed to it as a strong estimate.
Now, two reasonable voices are saying it was almost certainly a placeholder.
The first is Jordan Stapleton, who says he worked in gaming retail. He says Rockstar Games does not provide retailers with the actual pricing and marketing details until roughly an hour before the public announcement. What retailers get ahead of time is a brief overlay to build their e-commerce page around, things like artwork dimensions and how many SKUs to expect. This lets the retailer design the pre-agreed page template in advance, with the actual details dropped in at the last minute.
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The second is billbil-kun, one of the more reliable leakers of pricing and release dates in the industry. He pointed out that the EAN codes attached to the Fnac listings (EAN is the European equivalent of a UPC barcode) aren't the ones Take-Two Interactive typically uses. In plain terms, the product codes did not match the codes Take-Two normally uses for its games.
Evidence Against the GTA 6 Price Leak
| Signal | What It Means |
|---|---|
Rockstar withholds pricing until ~1 hour before announcement | Retailers physically do not have the real numbers yet to leak |
Retailers get only a template overlay (artwork size, SKU count) | The page structure is real; the prices filling it are not |
EAN codes did not match Take-Two's usual prefixes | The listings were dummy entries, not real Take-Two product records |
Five clean tiers (€89.99 to €199.99) | Plausible-looking, but plausible is easy to fake with round retail pricing |
Listings pulled quickly | Consistent with a retailer removing a template that went live too early |
The lesson here is the one that has held throughout this pre-launch cycle. Retailer listings are not Rockstar confirmations.
Admittedly, we gave that leak more credit than this one deserves in hindsight, if only because a legitimate retailer with consistent tiers and the correct date is more credible than a random £0.16 PlayStation Store glitch.
The lesson here is the one that has held throughout this pre-launch cycle: prices that appear on store pages before an official announcement are frequently placeholders, and the people who actually know (retail staff, technical leakers) consistently say so. The Best Buy pre-order date, the PlayStation Store price glitches, and now the Fnac SKUs all fit the same pattern of a legitimate-looking leak that spreads fast, only to be debunked.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean the Fnac numbers are wrong. Placeholder prices sometimes land near the real ones by coincidence, and €89.99 for a base edition still fits the broader AAA pricing trend.
The good news here is that, same as before, pre-orders open June 25, and per Stapleton's statement, the real pricing hits retailers only about an hour before the public sees it. This means the actual pricing is just days away and they'll arrive fast when they come. When they do, you can check them against the Fnac leak and see how close those placeholder guesses actually were.
Until then, treat the €89.99 figure as an educated guess at best, a random dummy number at worst. The real one comes from Rockstar and is due on or around June 25.