UPDATE 9/1: Those pre-orders are now the answer to the whole disc fight, as analytics firm Newzoo estimates GTA 6 sales could hit $4.5 billion by launch week while the leaker campaigning against digital pre-orders reportedly cashed out roughly $270,000 in crypto.
UPDATE: Those record-setting pre-orders have become a flashpoint, as a leak group is now demanding Rockstar kill digital pre-orders entirely, holding alleged GTA 6 footage and map images hostage to the cause.
Take-Two finally opened the books on Grand Theft Auto VI, sort of.
Speaking on the company’s first quarter earnings day, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed that GTA 6 pre-orders have “vastly” beaten Take-Two’s own internal forecasts, telling Bloomberg the early numbers are “unprecedented and astonishing.”
That’s the good news. The catch is that Take-Two won’t say what those numbers actually are, and Wall Street noticed.
The Numbers Take-Two Won’t Share
Take-Two reported $1.39 billion in net bookings for the quarter, beating estimates on the strength of NBA 2K and the GTA franchise.
But despite pre-orders blowing past every projection since they opened on June 25, the company reiterated its full-year outlook of $8.0 to $8.2 billion rather than raising it, a figure that sits well below Wall Street’s $8.62 billion consensus. Shares dipped on the conservative call.
Zelnick’s explanation is almost a humble brag: the demand is so far outside anything the company has seen that it can’t model what it means.
“They are so unprecedented that we just don’t know how it’ll translate into sales,” he said. Pre-orders can also still be canceled, and the game hasn’t sold a single unit yet.
For context, GTA 5 has moved more than 230 million copies since 2013, the second best-selling game of all time. Take-Two’s own forecasts for the sequel were presumably not modest. Pre-orders “vastly” exceeding them tells you everything about where this launch is heading.
Zelnick Defends the $80 Price and the Missing Disc
The CEO also addressed the two decisions that have dominated the conversation since June: the $79.99 standard edition price and the boxed copy that ships as a download code instead of a disc.
On price, Zelnick argued that video game costs have not kept pace with inflation, and pointed to the pre-order numbers as proof consumers are excited at both tiers.
On the disc, his defense was blunt math: over 90 percent of Take-Two’s business is already digital. He went considerably further in the full exchange, and we break down everything Zelnick said about the missing disc, and what he left out.
Both defenses are true as far as they go, and both sidestep the real complaint.
The objection was never that most people buy digital. It’s that the choice is being removed, a trend Sony made official when it announced the end of PlayStation disc production in 2028.
Pre-orders this strong will only convince the industry the backlash doesn’t cost anything.
Zelnick also teased that there’s a specific reason the Extended Look is premiering on Netflix instead of YouTube, saying only that viewers will understand once they watch.
We break down that tease, the fan backlash over the six-hour exclusivity window, and what it all might mean in our full report on why GTA 6’s big reveal is on Netflix.
Whatever lands on Netflix at 3 p.m. ET on August 27, the picture from earnings day is clear: the price controversy didn’t dent demand, the no-disc controversy didn’t dent demand, and the biggest game of the decade is tracking even bigger than the company that made it dared to forecast.
GTA 6 launches November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
