GTA 6 costs $79.99, and the Ultimate Edition is $99.99

Grand Theft Auto 6 is $79.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. Pre-orders opened at midnight on 25 June 2026.

What each edition gets you

• Standard, $79.99. The full single-player story across Vice City and Leonida, plus access to the online component whenever that arrives.
• Ultimate, $99.99. Adds vehicles, weapons, apparel and a salon, threaded through the campaign rather than walled off into a separate mode.

There is no collector's, deluxe or special edition beyond those two. If you are waiting for a steelbook with a statue in it, none has been announced.

The twenty dollars does not arrive at once

This is the part most coverage skips, and it changes the decision.

Rockstar's own wording is that the Ultimate Edition is an exclusive collection of items threaded across all aspects of the story. Threaded is doing real work in that sentence: the content becomes available as you reach the chapters it belongs to, not in a lump at midnight.

More usefully, the upgrade is sold separately at any time. You can buy the standard game, play it, and decide in December whether the extras are worth it, by which point you will know whether you are the kind of player who reaches the chapters they are threaded through. We went through the whole thing here.

Nothing in the expensive edition gets you in early. Everyone unlocks at midnight in their own timezone.

The physical version is not really physical

A boxed copy exists, but it contains a download code rather than a disc.

That matters more than it sounds. A disc can be lent, resold or played on a machine that is offline. A redeemed code is tied permanently to the account that used it, so the second-hand market for this game effectively does not exist. If you buy physical specifically to trade games afterwards, this is not that.

It also means the box is not a backup. Preloading opens 12 November and the download runs to somewhere around 200GB either way, so the case in your hand saves you nothing on launch night.

Eighty dollars in context

The $79.99 standard price puts Grand Theft Auto 6 at the top of the current console tier rather than beyond it, which is worth noting given how much pre-launch coverage predicted a $100 base game.

Console games sat at $59.99 for most of two decades, rose to $69.99 with the PlayStation 5 generation, and have been drifting toward $79.99 since. Rockstar is not setting a new ceiling here; it is confirming one that several publishers had already reached.

What is genuinely unusual is the absence of a tier above the Ultimate. There is no $150 edition with an art book and a map, which is the standard way to extract more from the people who will pay anything. Two editions and an upgrade path is a restrained line-up for a game this size.