It was bound to happen anyway, but we’re happy to report GTA 6 has officially surpassed Cyberpunk 2077‘s pre-order record with over 10.3 million copies sold ahead of Nov. 19. This figure steadily continues to rise as most pre-orders happen within a week or even days of a game’s launch, so we expect it to bloat even more by this time next week.
This is according to Sensor Tower, which has a dedicated GTA 6 sales tracking tool currently reporting 10.31 million copies sold as pre-orders. In total, the game has earned over a billion USD before it even came out, and that is from the pre-orders alone, not including the horrible collector’s edition or officially licensed merch. Of this billion, 750m came from the PlayStation Store, but surprisingly, 250m were generated via Xbox. Most people seem to be purchasing the $100 edition, with 7.73 million units sold on the PS Store, and 2.58m on Xbox.
What this tells me is people are more than comfortable spending extra bucks on what they perceive as a “good deal,” which could carry incredible implications for the future of gaming, especially in the AAA sphere. If people wanna spend $100 on this, they probably would want to dish out that much money on other games, too, and I don’t think it’ll be long before the standard AAA price is adjusted from the $70-80 range to $90-100. This is going to have a horrible impact on those not using USD as their currency, with the Euro always getting a 10-15 percent worse deal, and regional pricing oftentimes making games nigh-unpurchasable in some parts of the world.
At any rate, though, these pre-order numbers signal that GTA 6 is about to have a killer first week on the market, with previous projections looking at around $5 billion by the end of its opening weekend, if not more. It is by all means going to be the biggest game ever made, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the best, and when its Online version drops, I reckon Rockstar will be noting down double-digit billions of income every quarter from this one title alone.
Such is the state of the industry.
