Image credit: Rockstar / 2K

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders have officially gone live in many parts of the world, and while many players will be placing their pre-orders through the PlayStation and Xbox Stores, many others will order from Amazon and online retailers.

There's much less of a reason to buy a physical copy this time around, however, because the prices are identical across physical and digital, and because the physical version includes a code in the box and no disc. That voucher code can only be redeemed once, locking it to your account forever. In other words, you won't be able to re-sell your copy when you're done with it, hence why it's nearly pointless to buy a physical copy of GTA 6.

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But there is another, potentially even more frustrating wrinkle. A number of users have spotted a warning displayed on the GTA 6 listings across several major retailers' websites in the UK, that says: "The PlayStation 5 version can only be used by users holding an account for PlayStation registered to the United Kingdom."

GAME, Amazon, Smyths, ShopTo and TheGameCollection all have the same disclaimer. Eurogamer has verified these listings, and found them to include nearly identical language.

The same warning can also be seen on Smyths' Republic of Ireland website, though it instead requires users to hold "an account for PlayStation registered to the Republic of Ireland". The Republic of Ireland is a European Union country that is not part of the United Kingdom. This detail is important because digital game codes sold in EU countries have always been redeemable in all member states, as well as others in the European continent that are not part of the EU, like Iceland and Norway.

It is against EU law to geo-block products across European Economic Area borders. In fact, the European Commission fined Valve and several other publishers on Steam €7.8m for breaching that law in 2021.

Making matters more confusing is that other European retailers, such as Alternate and Saturn in Germany and GAME Spain instead have differing versions of the standard disclaimer, which states that code can be redeemed in the usual list of countries. In some cases it reads "code redeemable only within Europe and Switzerland", and in others it lists a large list of countries that all fall within the EMEA PlayStation region. MediaMarkt Germany and Micromania France don't have any such disclaimers.

Image credit: Rockstar / 2K

You'll notice that all of these listings are for the PS5 version of GTA 6. When we started working on this story, several of the same retailers included a similar disclaimer on the Xbox Store as well. But Xbox Series X/S codes have always been region-free, which is probably why those listings have now been updated to remove that language - though some still remain.

So what's going on here? Given the disparity across the stores we looked at, it's possible that some retailers are being extra cautious to avoid cross-country ordering. It's also possible they simply made a mistake, just as it is equally probable they're relaying the information they were given by Rockstar's sales department without looking too much into it.

We've contacted some of the UK retailers for clarification.

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