It’s the end of an era for marveling at all the stuff we got before GTA VI. The game is officially, truly, really, finally something people can pay actual money for. And it’s bound to be a biggie.
Grand Theft Auto VI is poised to be the single highest-grossing entertainment property of all time. That would be a feat, but not one without precedent for the series. Its predecessor, GTA V, sold $1 billion worth of copies in the first three days after launch and has since shipped 230 million copies. Adding on the money generated by the microtransactions players pay out in Grand Theft Auto Online, the game has garnered its publisher, Rockstar, and parent company Take Two Interactive nearly $10 billion in the 13 years since it was released.
That might all be dwarfed by the sequel. The game is scheduled to release on November 19, but preorders start today. The standard edition of the game costs $80—the highest base price for a video game on console ever. On top of that, there is a $100 ultimate edition.
The price hike comes after Rockstar invested more than $1 billion into GTA VI. Clearly, it is fully expecting a payout on the same level as GTA V, if not vastly more. The hype appears to be sufficient to reach those heights, given that fan communities on Reddit and Discord have whipped themselves into a frenzy about every minute detail they can glean from Rockstar’s very sporadic posts that have any information about the game. (The most recent official trailer for GTA VI came out more than a year ago. People have not stopped analyzing it since.)
The release of GTA VI is seen as a pivotal moment for the games industry. Gaming has fractured, threatened by AI, consolidating into a market where the biggest publishers succeed, and smaller developers are wracked by layoffs and underperforming titles. GTA VI will be viewed as a bellwether for the industry as a whole, particularly on the console front.
“This is the big one,” says Joost van Dreunen, a games industry adviser and professor of video games at the NYU Stern School of Business. “The whole industry has been clutching its little hands waiting for this one to come out, for a variety of reasons. It would prove that the game industry is still healthy at its core. That’s how people will read that.”
The game won’t actually be out for another five months, but it has garnered its share of dismay. For one, the game doesn’t come with a disc; preorders are for digital copies only. That has irked some fans who don’t love that digital games are replacing physical copies, as they take away from the feeling (and reality) of ownership. People are also big mad about the Ultimate edition, which costs $100 and includes actual game features that players on the standard edition will be locked out of, like access to custom shops in-game that let you customize the characters with certain tattoos or hairstyles.
It’s a frustration that has bubbled up to a roiling boil since Rockstar officially announced the new title. GTA VI has already been delayed twice, forcing other publishers to move their titles to avoid getting absolutely bodied by the demand for a new GTA game. Rockstar has also fielded some controversies, like firing workers who were attempting to unionize. (Don’t forget the massive Lapsus$ GTA hack of 2022 that saw the leak of early GTA VI footage and the source code for GTA V.) It puts the game in a little bit of a weird spot.
“GTA has built its success on being this countercultural narrative mock and parody of American civilization and consumer culture,” van Dreunens says. “In 2026, is it still possible to mock and provide satire on American civilization? It seems like real life has long caught up with art.”
The series often has sharp, crass satire about capitalism, with game narratives that task players with some manner of rags-to-riches story that usually ends in a scathing critique of how wealth and power can go horribly wrong. This might be a trickier target to hit for a company lining up a shot at billions of dollars in presales.
“Certain artists do well during their early stages, then they become sort of the institutionalized musicians or filmmakers or game makers,” van Dreunens says. “Is it still relevant? Does it resonate, or is it going to be too glossy?”
Regardless, GTA VI is almost certainly too big to fail. Even 13 years after release, people are playing GTA V and GTA Online, either in regular multiplayer or in elaborate roleplaying servers. Videos of people messing around in the game’s lively, reactive world are consistently in the top-viewed streaming videos on platforms like Twitch. Even without the content capture element, the promise of GTA VI is something that feels like a living, breathing world that you can spend time in.
“This is one cohesive universe, and you can kind of all hang out together,” van Dreunens says. “There’s an ambition, a promise underneath all this. If they pull it off, you have this rich overlay of all this stuff to do that you can share with other people. It has enormous potential.”
In 2023, Rockstar bought Cfx, a marketplace for modders who had created very popular roleplaying servers, and turned it into an official mod marketplace for user-created assets to be used in-game. Rockstar has indicated that GTA VI will have better content capture features that will enable players to more easily generate their own videos.
“GTA VI is the release of a new operating system for an entire community,” van Dreunens says. “I think that that’s a big difference here.”
