Updated
GTA 6's $100 Ultimate Edition is out-pre-ordering the $80 standard
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says GTA 6 pre-orders are skewing to the $100 Ultimate Edition — and the price is unlikely to drop for a long time.
The more expensive version of GTA 6 is the one people are buying. Asked on CNBC's Squawk Pod on August 10 whether pre-orders favor the $79.99 standard game or the $99.99 Ultimate Edition, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick answered directly: "Actually, it is skewing more to the premium edition."
Zelnick added his own caveat — the skew "might be a reflection of the fact that the most avid consumers are the ones who are pre-ordering." The die-hards buy first, and die-hards buy the big box. Whether the $100 version keeps leading once casual buyers show up closer to November 19 is a different question.
Why the expensive one is winning
The price gap is $20, and Rockstar packed the Ultimate Edition with things you permanently miss otherwise: two exclusive vehicle mod shops, the Stock 305 clothing store, Sara's salon, over 50 tattoos, a raidable PTT Youngin$ compound, and a garage of exclusive cars. Framed that way, plenty of players see the standard version as the incomplete one — the same logic that made fans grumble about content locked behind the higher tier in the first place. Grumbling, it turns out, is not the same as not paying.
It also fits everything else Take-Two has said this month: pre-orders have "vastly" beaten the company's internal forecasts, and Zelnick keeps declining to share actual numbers.
Don't wait for a sale
The other half of the CNBC conversation was about discounts, and the answer amounts to: not our problem, and not our plan. Zelnick noted Take-Two sets the price while storefronts can discount out of their own margin, then pointed at history: "We preserved our pricing on Grand Theft Auto 5 for a very long time. Much longer than a standard release of an entertainment property."
GTA 5 held its price far longer than a typical release while selling over 200 million copies. If that is the playbook — and Zelnick just said it is — a Christmas discount is off the table, and the $80 you see today is the price for a long while. The next real signal on what all these pre-order buyers are getting comes with the Extended Look on August 27.