GTA 6 on Black Friday: should you wait until November 27 for a lower price?

Black Friday has no "official" date set by any authority: it's a commercial event tied to the day after Thanksgiving in the US, the Friday following the fourth Thursday of November. Many retailers stretch the event over a full week ("Black Week"), usually starting around November 23.

A game that just launched, backed by the biggest marketing campaign in video game history and pre-orders Take-Two itself called "exceptional," has no commercial reason to be discounted a week after release. Retailers have neither the time nor the incentive to cut the price of a game still in peak demand.

In practice, the price on November 27 will most likely be the same as at launch: $79.99 for the Standard edition, $99.99 for the Ultimate (digital only), or the already-reduced prices at some retailers.

Rockstar doesn't discount its current releases. The closest comparison is Red Dead Redemption 2, launched October 26, 2018:

• For Black Friday on November 23, 2018 (4 weeks after launch — twice the gap GTA 6 will have this year), only the Special and Ultimate editions were discounted, by £9 each (about 10%) — the standard edition wasn't touched.
• GTA V, released in 2013, only dropped to very low prices (around $15 on some platforms) years after launch, during Steam sales or one-off retailer promotions like Walmart's — never during its first Black Friday.

The pattern is consistent: the more recent a Rockstar release, the smaller the discount. Since GTA 6 will be even closer to its launch than RDR2 was at its first Black Friday, a meaningful discount on the game itself is unlikely.

Even without a discount on the game, the Black Friday period is still worth watching:

• Consoles are historically the category most often discounted on Black Friday, bundled with a game or not. See our tracking of GTA 6 PS5 and Xbox bundles, updated if a deal appears.
• Accessories (controllers, storage, headsets) are the most commonly discounted products during this period, including models useful for GTA 6 — see our controllers and PS5 SSD pages.

We'll update this page each Monday in November if a concrete offer shows up.

It depends on your priority:

• You want to play at launch: don't wait. Pre-order now from the cheapest retailer (see our retailer comparison) to take advantage of pre-loading from November 12.
• You're mainly after a console: Black Friday remains the best window of the year for a console deal, with or without a game bundled in.
• You're hoping for a discount on the game alone: nothing in Rockstar's history suggests one, 8 days after launch.