GTA 6 fans have gone into overdrive — as they have done so many times recently amid the wait for Trailer 3 — after reports emerged online that Best Buy had potentially leaked the game’s pre-order date.
We’ve been here before, many times. Some fans actually believe in a Trailer 3 release date prediction that came from someone who charted the planetary positions for every single Rockstar Games trailer released since 2007.
Now, we have a rumor around the GTA 6 pre-order date. For any other game, this wouldn’t necessarily be massive news, nor would there be extreme interest in a leak. But this is GTA 6. It’s perhaps the most anticipated game of all time, and seems set to become the biggest entertainment launch in history. The date pre-orders go live will likely crash websites.
And so, we come to a YouTuber called Frogboyx1gaming, who, during a live stream, appeared to receive an email from Best Buy to his Best Buy affiliate account signalling a pre-order campaign for GTA 6 that would run from May 18-21. If true, that would suggest GTA 6 pre-orders go live on May 18, and if that’s true, you’d imagine GTA 6 Trailer 3 isn’t far away. Perhaps it’s coming today!
There’s already been a huge amount of fuss over the legitimacy of this email. Certainly, Frogboyx1gaming appears surprised to have received it during the livestream, and has been open in sharing images and photos to back up the claim. There’s all sorts of debate about various parts of the email, from the description of GTA 6 itself (as opposed to the full spelling, Grand Theft Auto VI), to the idea it would be sent in the first place. For what it’s worth, IGN has asked Best Buy for comment.
🚨BREAKING: GTA VI Pre-Orders (Physical) have leaked online!
👨💻It seems that Best-Buy affiliates have been receiving this email. The campaign is set to be running next week from May 18th-21st.
📱Credit: @Frogboyx1Gaming pic.twitter.com/eETF1Tuepx
— Project Vice (@project_vice) May 14, 2026
True or not, this is yet another indication of the intense scrutiny on GTA 6, Rockstar Games, and pretty much anything even tangentially related to the game’s development. I’ve even seen fans track how busy it is at coffee shops local to Rockstar North’s office in Scotland, in some weird video game version of the Pentagon pizza theory.
None of this intense involvement with GTA 6 is particularly healthy (GTA 6 Trailer 3 will come out eventually!), but it is fuelled by the huge gap between trailer drops and even basic gameplay information fans have had to sit through so far. It’s been over a year since Trailer 2 came out. Trailer 1 came out three years ago, in 2023. The drip-feed of GTA 6 news has been stretched to breaking point, as, it seems, have fans.
Strauss Zelnick, boss of rockstar parent company Take-Two, has said GTA 6 marketing will kick into gear in the summer, ahead of the planned November release date. So more is coming. When, exactly? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Take-Two is estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far on GTA 6. In an interview, Zelnick wouldn’t say how much exactly, but did admit “it was expensive.” To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie’s recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Concord’s initial development deal was around $200 million, according to a report by Kotaku. In 2023, new documents submitted as part of the Xbox Federal Trade Commission case accidentally revealed The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon Forbidden West each cost more than $200 million to develop. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter’s life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.
Given the expectation that GTA 6 will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time, it comes as no surprise to hear of astronomical development costs for Rockstar’s game. And it has been in the works for some time; according to Business Insider, some of the thousands of staff at Rockstar have been working on GTA 6 for over a decade now. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zelnick said development costs have risen over the years, but Take-Two tries to give its teams “unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection.”
Any conversation about GTA 6 development costs naturally leads to a discussion about how much Rockstar will charge for the game. Bank of America recently came out with a recommendation that GTA 6 be sold for $80, $10 more than the norm. Analyst opinions on the GTA 6 price are all over the place, with some saying Rockstar should stick with $70, and others saying it could easily justify going up to $100. While GTA 6 will undoubtedly set sales records, there are questions about how well it can do amid one of the toughest economies in recent memory.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
