The recently leaked and later rated Premium Edition of Grand Theft Auto 5 has seemingly been confirmed by a Kotaku report.
The report, itself coming from a number of anonymous sources, outlines the content of the new edition about which there has been frequent speculation, and also reveals a delay in release.
Rumors of a "Premium Edition" began some weeks ago when an Amazon listing for the new release of GTA 5 was spotted.
Subtitled "Premium Edition" and scheduled to be made available on the 23rd of March, the product page contained no specific information about what the contents of this new edition could possibly be. The listing was very quickly removed, thus for some time the very legitimacy of it was in question.
However, not too long ago an official rating from the South Korean Ratings Board was filed about this GTA 5 Premium Edition too. It seemingly confirmed that this new version was indeed happening, but the filing also had no indication of what would set it apart from regular GTA 5.
In the report published by Kotaku, it is stated that while the original release date of March 23 was correct on the Amazon listing and not a placeholder, Rockstar Games decided to delay the release of the Premium Edition for unknown reasons, but that it happened on short notice, likely meaning after the initial leak or even subsequent ratings filing.
The Premium Edition will now be released sometime in April.
However, the biggest question mark has hovered over the content of this Premium Edition. What sets it apart from the base game we can all buy — and over 90 million of us already have — right now?
It seems one of the most frequent theories is confirmed by the report, indicating that the GTA Online Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack, which is available separately as paid DLC providing players with in-game items for the multiplayer mode, will be bundled with the game.
This brings us to the lack of a South Korean rating for a PC version — this Premium Edition likely won't be released on PC because it would be utterly redundant, seeing as Steam already offers a bundled version of the game with the Starter Pack included.
No such bundles were available before on consoles, so Take-Two and Rockstar have taken this opportunity to dress up the bundle as a new edition, give it some media fanfare and take full advantage of the coverage and buzz around something that is technically a "new release".
The price of the GTA 5 Premium Edition will be equal to the standard retail price of the base game as well, replacing that version. This probably means that the vanilla non-premium edition of GTA 5 will, for the first time since its initial release in 2013, get a permanent price reduction down from the full AAA price.
The recent launch of this starter pack DLC, alongside this Premium Edition release, seems like an odd move so long after the game's initial launch, and after reaching so many sales milestones.
I mean, with so many copies sold, are there really enough people left in the world who intend to buy GTA 5, but haven't done so yet, to warrant a new edition? Apparently, Rockstar thinks there is.
