Bank of America Says GTA 6 Should Cost $80 to Save the Games Industry

Nobody has officially said what GTA 6 will cost. Rockstar and Take-Two have danced around the subject for months, and the closest thing to an answer we've got is Strauss Zelnick saying the price will feel "very reasonable." Helpful. But now Bank of America has thrown its opinion into the ring, and it's not a subtle one.

Omar Dessouky, an analyst at BofA Global Research, attended last week's iicon conference in Las Vegas and came away with a firm recommendation: GTA 6 should be priced at $80. That's $10 above what most major releases cost right now, and $10 above what Take-Two has so far seemed to hint at. His reasoning? If GTA 6 launches at $70, the rest of the industry loses any leverage to charge more than that going forward.

"We also heard from attendees that the industry, which is perceived as struggling, would have difficulty selling games for $80 if GTA 6 came out at $70," Dessouky is quoted as saying via Seeking Alpha. "We think it's in Take-Two's self-interest, as a publisher and partner to many developers, to raise the price point for the entire industry."

So the argument is that Take-Two would essentially be doing publishers a favour by pricing their game higher, setting a new ceiling that everyone else gets to follow. Whether gamers see it as a favour is a different conversation entirely.

What Zelnick Actually Said

At the same conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was notably careful with his words. He didn't name a price. He didn't rule one out. What he did do was frame the whole thing around perceived value.

"Consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery," Zelnick said. "How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got."

He also pointed to something that the industry tends to ignore when these pricing debates flare up: games have, in real terms, got cheaper over time. Major releases sat at $60 for most of a decade, and even at $70 they haven't kept pace with general inflation.

"If you look at it through that lens, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense," he said. "But that isn't the lens through which we look."

It's worth noting that in a separate interview earlier this year, Zelnick made an offhand comment about games people pay "70 or 80 bucks for" when discussing in-game advertising, calling it "unfair" to show ads in a game at that price. That's about as close to a number as we've got.

The $70 Domino Effect

The logic behind the Bank of America recommendation is actually worth taking seriously, even if it stings a bit. Nintendo already moved to $80 with Mario Kart World. If GTA 6, the single biggest entertainment launch in history by most projections, sells tens of millions of copies at $70, it hands every other publisher a difficult question: why are you charging more than Rockstar?

That's the pressure Dessouky is pointing at. GTA 6 carries so much weight that its price point won't just affect Take-Two. It'll shape what the rest of the industry thinks it can get away with charging for the next several years.

Whether that argument persuades Take-Two or not is another matter. Zelnick seemed more focused on making sure players feel they got a deal rather than on propping up competitors' pricing strategies. Which is, arguably, the right way to think about it.

Analyst opinions are scattered across the spectrum on this one. Some say $70 is fine and the goodwill alone is worth it. Others have floated $100 depending on what GTA Online's next iteration looks like and how aggressively Take-Two plans to monetise it post-launch.

What We're Still Waiting For

The actual price, along with everything else, will presumably become clear once Rockstar's marketing campaign kicks off. Zelnick confirmed at iicon that the push is coming "soon," with a summer start window expected. Trailer 3 is the big one fans are waiting on.

GTA 6 launches on 19th November 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. There's still no PC release date, something Zelnick has addressed separately. The price? We'll find out when Rockstar decides we're ready to know.