GTA 6 Is on Track for the Biggest Launch Ever

The record-breaking headlines are out, and they are enormous. According to the analytics firm Newzoo, Grand Theft Auto VI has already logged the strongest pre-order campaign ever recorded, and is on pace to sell between 37 and 51 million copies in its first week, generating somewhere between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion in launch revenue. Those are absurd, almost cartoonish numbers. They are also worth a second look.

The foundation here is that roughly $180 million was spent on digital pre-orders across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain in a single week, before Rockstar Games has even released a third trailer or started marketing in earnest. A game booking this kind of money five months before launch, with almost no active marketing, is genuinely unprecedented. Newzoo then scaled that regional number up to roughly $260 million globally, using the player distribution of Grand Theft Auto V as a map, since those six markets made up about 69 percent of that game's console player base. From there, it applied a historical pre-order curve to project the first-week sales.

Before these estimates, there were viral claims saying that the next Grand Theft Auto had already pulled in a billion dollars in pre-orders alone. Newzoo called these numbers "absurd", adding that given how pre-order curves work, nothing ever has done that and nothing ever will in the near future this far from launch. So if you saw the billion-dollar figure and believed it, the firm behind these actual record numbers is telling you it is nonsense.

Now, while Newzoo's numbers are more grounded, even their projections deserve a hard, second look.

You see, sales projections like this are really about attach rate, the percentage of console owners who buy a specific game.

When GTA V launched in 2013, it sold a then-staggering 16 million copies in its first week, which worked out to roughly a 10 percent attach rate against the enormous installed base of PlayStation 3 and Xbox Series consoles at the time. After a year, that number climbed to 33 million units against an install base of around 110 million, as per Gabelli, resulting in an attach rate of roughly 30 percent. The high end of this new projection, 51 million copies against the roughly 134 million current-generation consoles sold, implies an attach rate closer to 40 percent, in a week.

If this happens, this would mean nearly four in every ten people who own a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series console ends up buying GTA 6 in the first week. Possible? Maybe. It's also a genuinely enormous assumption to bake into a headline, even if most console owners these days bought one to play games unlike back in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era where a lot of those consoles were sold as cheaper Blu-ray player alternatives and living-room media boxes, bought by people who barely played video games, which dragged the effective attach rate down.

So, yes, GTA VI should have a higher attach rate than back in 2013, but probably not nearly four times higher than its predecessor.

With that said, these projections, even if absurd, are the exact reason why Sony isn't worried about the disc backlash. These record pre-orders are pouring in during the exact same weeks that fans have been loudly furious about the discless physical edition, the $80 price, and the no-disc-no-buy movement. All of that anger, all those threats to boycott, happening at the same moment as the strongest pre-order campaign ever recorded. People are protesting, and they are pre-ordering anyway, which is precisely why neither Sony nor Rockstar are losing a moment of sleep.

So take the record for what it genuinely is, and take the projection with the appropriate pinch of salt. The game will sell an astonishing number of copies, most likely the most ever for a video game for decades.

Whether it sells a physically-improbable number is a different question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, least of all from a single week of pre-orders this far out.