Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders went live at midnight, and while many folks are likely opting to buy Rockstar’s next blockbuster on the PlayStation and Xbox digital stores, many people are buying the physical copies that will only include a download code rather than a disc. Despite a day of controversy leading up to pre-orders going live, the discless boxes are selling out, and scalpers are doing what they always do and reselling them.
Amazon was, for at least a brief window, sold out of the PlayStation 5 version of GTA6. The retailer has since updated its listing and is selling them again, but the window for the game being sold out was long enough that you’ll now find promised physical copies listed on sites like eBay for more than the $80 the game already costs at retail.
The deep irony in all of this is that not only is buying an early physical edition of Grand Theft Auto 6 basically paying for an expensive paperweight without a disc, but there are now reports that an actual disc version of GTA6 may be coming as soon as a month after the game launches in November. Rockstar has yet to officially announce that, presumably so people don’t wait a month to buy the game, but with this information out there, fans need to weigh what matters most to them: playing the game on launch day or getting a physical disc. Which, hey, I’m not here to tell you what you should prioritize. I’ve bought games twice in the past just so I could fire up the digital version I’d downloaded right at midnight even though I knew a physical copy was on its way to me later that day. So I’m hardly the bastion of rational judgment.
Now that all the bad news from yesterday has had time to settle, there is a growing sentiment that Grand Theft Auto 6’s entire pre-order situation is pretty odd. On top of some folks arguing that the game’s $100 Ultimate Edition feels like it’s the actual “complete” experience and that the lack of physical discs making buying a “physical” copy feel meaningless, there was no new trailer for the game alongside pre-orders, which means that, despite the game being five months away, we have not seen any actual GTA6 gameplay. Obviously a lot of fans are pre-ordering the game on blind faith that Rockstar will deliver, but all we’ve seen of the game thus far are cutscenes of Jason and Lucia’s story, rather than what we’ll actually do in the game when it comes out in November. Obviously Grand Theft Auto comes with certain expectations of a rich open world to drive and shoot through, but it’s kind of insane that we haven’t seen any of that yet. Grand Theft Auto 6 continues to test the “too big to fail” theory, and it seems like even a concentrated storm of controversy a day before pre-orders go live and a complete lack of footage of the game being played aren’t enough to stop this train.
Grand Theft Auto 6 comes to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19.
