Every Way to Play GTA 6 at Launch, Ranked by Price

The honest answer to how much Grand Theft Auto VI costs depends entirely on what you already own. If a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X|S is sitting under your TV, you are looking at the price of one game. If you need to buy a console too, the bill runs from a few hundred dollars to around a thousand. The cheapest option on paper is a PS5 you cannot legally buy outside Japan, so the cheapest route, if we're being literal, is to buy the game if you already own the console.

Rockstar Games is selling GTA 6 as two editions. The Standard Edition covers the full campaign and the Ultimate Edition costs about 20 dollars more and adds cosmetic items, extra vehicles and weapons, two exclusive side-mission lines and a set of in-game vendors like a car mod shop, a tattoo parlor and a clothing store. You can get tattoos and customize cars without Ultimate, just not at those specific shops. In the United States that is 79.99 dollars for Standard and 99.99 dollars for Ultimate.

We broke down what each edition includes in full, and both come with the same pre-order bonuses if you order before the game comes out on November 19. Also, digital pre-orders unlock a pre-load from November 12, a week early, though nobody gets to play before launch since there is no early access. There is no physical disc for either edition and there is no collector's edition. GTA 6 is also not on Xbox Game Pass at launch. There is no PC version yet either, so consoles are the only way in on day one.

The game itself does not cost the same everywhere and the gap is wider than most people expect. The 79.99 dollar US price sits right in the middle of the pack. Japan, India and South Korea pay noticeably less once you convert the local price, while the United Kingdom, the Eurozone, Australia and Brazil pay more because of taxes. Canada is a touch below the US and South Korea is the cheapest storefront in the world at around 58 dollars for Standard.

Those gaps make it tempting to buy the game from another country's store, usually Japan, India or South Korea, by setting a console account to that region. It works and can save you real money. It also breaks the terms of service for both PlayStation and Xbox, which forbid misrepresenting your country to get a lower price.

Accounts caught may find themselves suspended at any given moment and any store credit on them lost, so you risk the console library you already paid for just to save 20 dollars on one game. Even if it's Grand Theft Auto we're talking about, that's a losing trade no matter how you look at it.

With that said, GTA 6 runs on the PS5 and the Xbox Series X and Series S, so any current gen console will play it. The cheapest on paper is the Japan-only PS5 Digital Edition in Midnight Black at 55,000 yen, around 350 dollars, which we covered as the cheapest way in. The catch is that it's only available in Japan, locked to Japanese as its system language, needs a PlayStation Network account set to Japan and you can't import it unless someone local buys it for you. For almost everyone outside Japan the cheapest console they can use is the Xbox Series S at 499.99 dollars, the entry-tier, digital-only machine. From there the ladder climbs through the PS5 and up to the PS5 Pro.

Refurbished and used consoles can undercut every new price here, but condition and warranty vary and you never quite know what you are getting. Do not count on bundles to save money either - there is no official GTA 6 console bundle from Sony, Microsoft or Rockstar. Some retailers have started packaging a console with the game themselves, butthe retailer bundles rarely cost less than buying the two separately.

The fact is, there's really no incentive for anyone to sell GTA 6 for a low price unless they're trying to outsell their competition. GTA historically has maintained its launch pricing for months, years even, so don't bet on holiday discounts.

Ultimately, this is the latest chapter in a long run of price stories we have followed. Sony's global PS5 price increase pushed hardware up right before launch and made GTA 6 more expensive for millions before they had even bought it. We laid out whether a PS5 or an Xbox is the better buy, tracked how the game could set off the biggest console sales rush in PlayStation history and confirmed which platforms are locked in for launch. The common thread here is that the sticker price was only ever the start of the bill.

The cheapest way to play GTA 6 is the one you can already afford. If you own a console, it is one game at your region's price. If you do not, the Xbox Series S is the cheapest new way in for most of the world, the Japan PS5 is a mirage for everyone outside Japan, a cheaper region store can trim the game price if you're willing to risk it and the only way to get GTA 6 for free is to luck it out in our giveaway.