Grand Theft Auto 6 preorders begin tonight at midnight local time in the US; here's where to buy — get yours now, it's in the garage and ready to roll

News
By
Published

Rockstar and Take Two Interactive are set to make as much money as an AI company, but in real dollars.

Grand Theft Auto VI
(Image credit: Take Two Interactive)

The preorder pages for GTA will drop at midnight local time in the US tonight, and you can buy both the Standard and Ultimate editions at the links below. Digital preorders of either variant get a month of GTA+ subscription as a preorder bonus.

Hype is cyclic. Once upon a time, there was Daikatana, the game that would have John Romero making us his female canine, but flunked hard. Then there was Half-Life 2, a game that still begs for a third installment today. Spore showed us how excellent ideas still need equal execution. In modern times, No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 both had massive hype and massive flops, turned around with many years' labor. And yet to this day, there's nothing quite like the buzz surrounding Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto VI, or as it'll be forever known, GTA 6.

The Standard edition goes for $79.99 and has the base game, the Vintage Vice City Pack with retro-themed cosmetics, and the '55 Vapid Stanier vehicle. The Ultimate Edition goes for a cool $99.99 and contains extra side missions and activities, additional vehicles, guns, and a truckload of outfits and other cosmetics for Jason and Lucia both.

These preorders at retailers mean you purchase a physical box that has a slip of paper inside with a download code, but not physical media. As such, this is for collector's item purposes. Without further ado, click away to your favorite e-tailer.

We won't bother rehashing details about the impending sequel to Rockstar's massively successful and still giant money printer Grand Theft Auto V. Suffice to say that the November 19 release is so hotly anticipated that employees are calling sick already, and there are reports of entire workplaces planning to shut down for the day. Many publishers and studios are reshuffling their release calendars so as not to get drowned in what is guaranteed to be the talk of the Internet for at least a few weeks, too.

Meanwhile, PC gamers will have to wait a year to see the game running natively on their systems and will have to drown their sorrows in one of the literal thousands of games that never make it to consoles. Regardless, Take Two Interactive's revenue is probably going to rival that of some AI companies — but in real dollars.

Google Preferred Source

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Bruno Ferreira
Bruno Ferreira
Contributor

Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.

27 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JTWrenn
    Physical editions with no actual disks are pretty lame. That said I never was a fan of the series. Just not my cup of tea. I am sure people will play it to death but feel like they went a bit far on the price, spend, and the whole no disk in a physical box thing. AAA games are less and less my thing.
    Reply
  • usertests
    You need Ultimate edition for vehicle customization. Maybe people care about that idk.

    Given inflation and the sheer scope of a game like this, there's not much room to complain about $60 shifting to $80. If it is in fact a good game.

    Meanwhile, PC gamers will have to wait a year to see the game running natively on their systems and will have to drown their sorrows in one of the literal thousands of games that never make it to consoles.
    It would be funny if this led to increased hacking or emulation of the current-gen consoles. A good project for the agentic coding era?
    Reply
  • adamboy64
    So.. as has been mentioned by JTWrenn, there's no physical media.
    Are you like.. putting in pre-orders for a game case..? Or pre-orders for a physical game code inside the game case?

    So it's releasing on PC a fair bit later, hey..? The amount of double dippers is going to be immense.
    That's a great way to make stacks more money.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    JTWrenn said:
    Physical editions with no actual disks are pretty lame. That said I never was a fan of the series. Just not my cup of tea. I am sure people will play it to death but feel like they went a bit far on the price, spend, and the whole no disk in a physical box thing. AAA games are less and less my thing.
    Game CD's are nice, but we have gotten to the point where triple A titles don't fit on a 100 gigabyte triple layer Blu-ray and if they did the access times and limited bandwidth would make games have inexcusable load times if they weren't simply installed to disk.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    derekullo said:
    Game CD's are nice, but we have gotten to the point where triple A titles don't fit on a 100 gigabyte triple layer Blu-ray and if they did the access times and limited bandwidth would make games have inexcusable load times if they weren't simply installed to disk.
    They could do like Windows did and place it on a USB storage device, though perhaps that may add a little to the price (only a little - small USB flash drives, particularly if for read-only content, are not that expensive).

    When it comes to the game itself and AAA titles in general, I'm in very much the same boat as JTWrenn. Partly why I no longer care much about upgrading my system.

    And what, truly, is the point of pre-ordering?
    Reply
  • JamesLahey
    I know my opinion is just a wisp of smoke on the breeze, but I think we need to try to convince as many people as possible to stop preordering games.

    It made sense for limited edition bundles for the fans, when they included plenty of swag, along with physical backup/media, but in the era we find ourselves, I can’t see how it does anything except subsidize the business.

    I don’t much care to tie up my cash on a piece of software at risk of delays, and with zero feedback on quality or performance.

    If we want to see something of value, there should be a kickback - a cheaper deal to preorder at minimum.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Neilbob said:
    They could do like Windows did and place it on a USB storage device, though perhaps that may add a little to the price (only a little - small USB flash drives, particularly if for read-only content, are not that expensive).
    NAND prices are way up. The price you pay for a 256 GB drive (likely needed to hold the whole game, but size unconfirmed) is probably $40-50, about twice what it used to be. Bought in bulk it would be cheaper, but a lot more than what pressed discs cost.

    Might be a $150 Super Deluxe Ultimate perk. But it would be something to look nice and a means of copying the game onto your SSD, and then removing and forgetting about it. Since flash drives would bottleneck loading times severely in GTA VI if you had to read from them during play.

    Big companies do not want to deal with physical media anymore.
    Reply
  • Moonstick2
    derekullo said:
    Game CD's are nice, but we have gotten to the point where triple A titles don't fit on a 100 gigabyte triple layer Blu-ray and if they did the access times and limited bandwidth would make games have inexcusable load times if they weren't simply installed to disk.
    There have been games released on multiple optical discs in the past, and I guess if the game could be downloaded to a drive over the internet it could be installed on a drive from discs.

    If they had the will, there'd be a way.
    Reply
  • bolweval
    What exactly is the benefit of pre-ordering?
    Reply
  • bill001g
    Stuff like this really makes me think console gamers are really as dumb as a box of rocks. Why would you give a company your money months in advance for pretty much nothing.

    To a point I can see buying a couple days before launch if they also allow downloads. The company should actually give you a discount for doing this since it reduces the amount of capacity they must buy/rent on their download servers on launch day.

    For a game that is single player with no online content I really don't get why you need to play on hour 1 of launch. The game will be the same a week or even a year later. Likely have all the bugs fixed the early players had to suffer though.

    I could see if this was a online game where you get some advantage over other players. Why would you schedule your vacation for this launch date running the risk that there is some delay and you sit home watching a waiting screen count down.

    Maybe I have just gotten too cynical and assume all marketing is someone trying rip people off. A lot of this type of advertising is playing into the fear of missing out that it seems a lot of people suffer from.
    Reply