Most GTA 6 pre-orders are for the $100 edition - and that proves far less than Take-Two thinks

A hundred dollars for a single game used to be the punchline of a joke about the future. We're in that future now, and the punchline is selling well.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told CNBC that Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are running "much better than expected", and that the split leans toward the pricier Ultimate edition at $100 (£90) rather than the $80 (£70) Standard. His explanation is disarmingly simple: people who pre-order months in advance are exactly the type who value what's in the bigger box.

He's right. That's the problem.

The most self-selected sample in the industry

Anyone putting money down on a game this far ahead of release has already decided. They're not weighing it against rent, or against three smaller games, or against waiting for a sale. They're the top slice of the most committed audience on the planet, and Rockstar spent a lot of energy making sure the more expensive edition looked like the obvious pick for exactly those people. Of course the split skews upward.

What that number does not tell you is how the game sells in week six, or how it sells to the guy who buys two, maybe three full-price games a year. Publishers love quoting pre-order mix because it's the friendliest data they'll ever have. Treating it as proof that $100 is fine is like polling people leaving a concert about whether the band is any good.

What it looks like from where we're sitting

The dollar figure isn't the number that matters locally - the number on the store page is, and in this region a full-price release has always been a bigger bite out of a monthly wage than it is in the US or the UK. That's why so many players here still buy discs, still trade them, still lend them around a group of friends until the case comes back scratched. It's not nostalgia for physical media, it's arithmetic.

And this is where the deluxe-edition drift quietly costs us something. The more the market pushes people toward digital upgrade tiers, the more of that value evaporates the moment you buy it. A disc holds part of its price; an upgraded digital edition holds none of it. Pay the extra and you've bought something you can never pass on.

The usual counter-strategy - wait, buy it discounted - is also weaker than usual here. Rockstar isn't a publisher that panics into 50 percent off after a quarter. GTA 5 held its asking price for an absurdly long time, and there's no reason to expect a different playbook. Anyone hoping to grab this cheap by spring should probably plan for a longer wait than that.

So yes, the pre-orders are strong, and yes, they skew expensive. I just don't think either fact tells us anything about whether $100 becomes the new normal. The honest test comes later: what the Standard edition is doing in month two, and how many people quietly decided this one could wait.

Image: Gary Stevens / CC BY 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_Theft_Auto,_NY_Chinatown.jpg