GTA 6 on the Richter scale
I’ve had a lot of time to think about the impact GTA 6 will have when it releases. It’s been teased so long that we’ve all had time to prepare for its inevitability. We’ve only seen two trailers if we’re not counting the leaks. We know very little about the game, but its looming release feels different. This is going to be massive for so many reasons.
The last GTA, GTA 5, came out in 2013. A lot has happened in 12 years; the landscape has changed. Live service games took over and every major developer tried to cash in on the trend. GTA 5, although technically not a live-service game, definitely had elements of a live-service game before it was ubiquitous. Rockstar, developers of the GTA series, introduced GTA online with the release of GTA 5, and with it came Shark Cards. You could buy these “cards” with real-life money, which is just converted to in-game currency. This made them so much money they re-released GTA two more times. The game was originally released on the Xbox 360 and PS3, respectively. It was updated and re-released for the new generation Xbox One and PS4 in 2014 (PC in 2015) and was updated and re-released, yet again, for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2022.
At the time, GTA 5 was the most expensive video game ever made, at $265 million. According to Rockstar’s earnings as of January 2025, they had made over $8.9 billion in profit. GTA 6 is reaching fevered heights of anticipation never seen before. It stands to reason, then, that GTA 6 is set to break the records previously set by GTA 5. It’s set to exceed the previous 256 million dollar budget of 5, potentially surpassing 9 billion in profit. They’ll undoubtedly achieve high profit levels by, once again, implementing a shark card-like system into GTA 6 online. More importantly, however, they’ll charge $80 or more for the base game.
Before the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, the game industry speculated that GTA 6 would cost $100, effectively raising the price of all games subsequently. Who would have thought that Nintendo would be the first to break the $70 game price and charge $80 for the new Mario Kart World. This set a precedent that other companies were eager to adopt. Xbox infamously said their latest game, Outer Worlds 2, would cost $80 as well. Met with disgust from the community, they quickly backpedaled and dropped that down to $70. Will GTA 6 be $100, and will this raise the bar and open the floodgates for other companies to charge $100 for their big titles? Personally, I don’t see them charging a full $100 for one product. They could split the product into two entities and charge more for each. They could charge you $70 to purchase the single-player GTA 6 and then charge $30 for GTA 6: Online only. Either way, GTA 6 will change how games are monetized going forward. Better get out of their way
in May 2026, there will be a massive GTA 6-sized crater. We just saw this happen with Team Cherry’s Silksong. Probably THE most anticipated indie game just released in September. When they announced their release date, a lot of other indie devs decided to move the release dates for their games out of the way of Silksong. Since it would be such a massive release, they didn’t want to get buried by it. Even indie games like Baby Steps, which are not directly competing with Silksong, moved their release dates around Silksong. If little indie games are moving out of the way for Silksong, what is GTA 6 going to do? Who, in their right mind, would dare release their game anywhere near GTA 6? It will dominate every headline surrounding its release, drowning out any other game released around the same time. I feel bad for any developer whose game is projected to be completed by Spring 2026. What do you do? Do you rush your game out the door before May, or do you delay it and hope the GTA hype dissipates by the end of the year?
It feels hyperbolic to say, but GTA 6 will change video games forever, for better or worse. I’ve never seen hype levels this high in the 30 years I’ve been playing games. Regardless of what you think will happen, it will be the most expensive piece of media ever made. It will also be released at an interesting time in the world and, I’m sure, will be wrongfully used as a scapegoat for violence in kids, as is tradition. 2026 will undoubtedly be the year of GTA 6.