GTA 6 standard or Ultimate: what the extra $20 actually buys

Grand Theft Auto 6 comes in two editions. Standard is $79.99 and Ultimate is $99.99, and the odd thing about that gap is that the expensive one's winning.

Take-Two's chief executive confirmed last month that Ultimate is outselling standard in pre-orders. Game editions don't usually go that way, so it's worth knowing what people are actually paying for before you decide whether to join them.

What you get in each

Twenty dollars for a head start

Everything in Ultimate is content inside a single-player game you'll play once. None of it's a season pass, none of it's a currency, and none of it expires. So the question's pretty simple: is a set of starting vehicles, a weapon locker, some clothes and one side mission worth twenty dollars to you?

For most people, honestly, no, and the reason is that the base game is enormous. You're never short of cars in a Grand Theft Auto game. You're short of time.

Two catches

The Ultimate content doesn't all show up at once. The unlocks are staged instead of being handed over at the title screen, so buying up doesn't mean you start the game with everything in it. We've covered how that actually works separately.

The GTA+ month is strange. GTA+ is the subscription tied to the online mode, and Grand Theft Auto 6 ships without one. Nobody's explained what a free month of it is for in a game with no online part on day one.

Which one to buy

The physical edition has no disc

This catches somebody out every launch, and this time it's worse, because the box doesn't contain a game. It contains a code.

So physical buyers are downloading the same 150 to 200GB as everybody else, and the box is worth exactly what the code inside it is worth. Boxes ship on 12 November, the day preloading opens, so code-in-box buyers can preload alongside everyone else and won't be stuck starting on launch night. Details are in our preload piece.

Why Rockstar's happy either way

One last thing, and it's about Take-Two's numbers more than your wallet.

Take-Two has guided to $8.0 to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the year, and a pre-order mix leaning toward the $99.99 edition lifts the revenue per copy without a single extra sale. The company can hit the top of its own forecast with the same number of buyers, just because more of them picked the expensive box.

That doesn't mean you should buy it, or that you shouldn't. The choice in front of you was designed carefully, though, so make yours on purpose.