GTA 6's publisher is focused on over-delivering content compared to the game's price tag, and wants to make sure any price tag is "good news" for players.
As first reported by GameSpot, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was recently asked on an earnings call for his thoughts on pricing for the publisher's entire catalog, as well as the GTA franchise in particular. "Look, there’s more content constantly being made available, and we really aim to deliver great value at any given time," Zelnick responded.
"We're so focused on delivering more value than what we charge. And that’s sort of the rubric," the Take-Two CEO added. Zelnick also explained that whenever Take-Two establishes a game's price, it wants to make sure the price is "good news" for customers and that the "experience vastly over-delivers" compared to the price charged for the game.
- As some analysts "hope" GTA 6 will normalize $100 games, one Baldur's Gate 3 dev points out that "prices haven't risen with inflation"
- GTA 6 will be "worth waiting for" says CEO of Rockstar owner, who teases that "we really focus on presenting something to the audience that they just haven't seen before"
Obviously, GTA 6's eventual price point is what the question in the earnings call was getting at here, but it's one that Zelnick sidesteps addressing directly. If you cast your mind back a few years, it was actually Take-Two that first introduced the $70 price point for a game with NBA 2K21, which has since been adopted by countless other publishers for new-gen titles, including Sony, Square Enix, and more.
Last year in 2023, Zelnick said he thought players were happy paying $70 for games, and that mindset hasn't changed. "In terms of frontline pricing for NBA 2K21, I think that worked out very much as expected. And as planned, it's in a premium offering at the highest possible level, the title was built from the ground up for next-gen, so first title here that has been created that way," Zelnick said. "And the acceptance by consumers has been nothing short of extraordinary."
Again, this isn't a commitment to raising GTA 6's price tag, but it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll be paying $70 at minimum for the new game when it eventually launches in Fall 2025. Elsewhere over the last few days, Zelnick said in an interview that Rockstar is trying to create "an experience that no one has seen before" with GTA 6, and "perfection is hard to measure," but it's not simply down to there being an absence of bugs in the new game.
Additionally, Rockstar detectives think GTA 6's cover art and screenshots could be revealed very soon.
