GTA 6 standard or Ultimate: what the extra $20 actually buys
Ultimate is outselling standard in pre-orders, which is unusual. Here is everything in each edition, what the extras are worth, and who should ignore them.
Grand Theft Auto 6 comes in two editions. Standard is $79.99 and Ultimate is $99.99, and the interesting fact about that gap is that the expensive one is winning.
Take-Two's chief executive confirmed last month that Ultimate is outselling standard in pre-orders. That is not how game editions usually behave, and it is worth understanding what people are actually buying before you decide whether to join them.
What is in each
| Standard, $79.99 | Ultimate, $99.99 | |
|---|---|---|
| The full game | Yes | Yes |
| Vehicles at your safehouses | No | Yes, including a Vapid Ganado, a Dinka Enduro, a Shitzu Squalo and a '67 Vapid Dominator Buggy |
| Weapons and a stash | No | Yes, a weapon locker at Paradise Garage and a crate of explosives on the boat |
| Apparel | No | Yes |
| Extra in-game shops | No | Yes |
| A bonus side mission | No | Yes |
| A month of GTA+ | No | Yes |
The part worth thinking about
Everything in Ultimate is content inside a single-player game you will play once. None of it is a season pass, none of it is a currency, and none of it expires. That makes it a straightforward question: is a set of starting vehicles, a weapon locker, some clothes and one side mission worth twenty dollars to you.
For most people the honest answer is no, and the honest reason is that the base game is enormous. You are not short of cars in a Grand Theft Auto game. You are short of time.
Two genuine caveats
The Ultimate content does not all arrive at once. The unlocks are staged rather than handed over at the title screen, so buying up does not mean starting the game with everything in it. We have covered how that actually works separately.
The GTA+ month is strange. GTA+ is the subscription attached to the online mode, and Grand Theft Auto 6 ships without one. Nobody has explained what a free month of it is for in a game with no online component on day one.
Who should buy which
| You are | Buy |
|---|---|
| Playing the story once and moving on | Standard |
| Going to put a hundred hours into it | Ultimate, the extras cost less per hour than a coffee |
| Undecided and not in a hurry | Standard, and upgrade later |
| Buying physically | Read the next section first |
The physical edition has no disc
This catches somebody out every launch and this time it is worse, because the box does not contain a game. It contains a code.
That means physical buyers are downloading the same 150 to 200GB as everybody else, and it means the box is worth exactly what the code in it is worth. Boxes ship on 12 November, the day preloading opens, so code-in-box buyers can preload alongside everyone else rather than starting on launch night. Details are in our preload piece.
Why the mix matters beyond your wallet
One last thing, because it explains why Rockstar is fine either way.
Take-Two has guided to $8.0 to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the year, and a pre-order mix tilted toward the $99.99 edition lifts the revenue per copy without needing a single extra sale. The company can reach the top of its own forecast on the same number of buyers, purely because more of them chose the expensive box.
That is not a reason to buy it or not buy it. It is a reason to notice that the choice you are being offered has been designed carefully, and to make it deliberately.
Your unlock
Reading your clock…
Working out your timezone.
Who plays before you
| Where | Zone | Relative to you |
|---|---|---|
| Auckland | NZDT | … |
| Sydney | AEDT | … |
| Tokyo | JST | … |
| Dubai | GST | … |
| Berlin, Madrid, Paris | CET | … |
| London | GMT | … |
| São Paulo | BRT | … |
| New York | EST | … |
| Chicago | CST | … |
| Los Angeles | PST | … |
| Honolulu | HST | … |
Worked out from your browser's own timezone, on Rockstar's stated behaviour of unlocking at local midnight. If your platform unlocks on a fixed global instant instead, this will be out by your offset. Offsets shown are the ones in force on 19 November, so daylight saving is already accounted for.
Sources
Keep reading
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