Grand Theft Auto 6 is predicted to generate sales of up to $5.2 billion by the end of launch week after enjoying the strongest preorder campaign one analyst has ever seen.
Newzoo analysis shows GTA 6 generated approximately $180 million in digital preorders across the U.S. and the five biggest European markets during the last week of June (GTA 6 preorders went live at midnight, June 25).
The analytics firm used GTA 5’s player distribution (around 69% of GTA 5’s lifetime console players sit within those six markets) to then estimate global first-week preorder spending for GTA 6 at approximately $260 million. Based on comparable preorder curves, GTA 6 is currently tracking toward $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion in cumulative sales by the end of launch week.
“The first week of preorders generated an estimated $260 million in global digital spending, the largest opening Newzoo has observed,” Ronan Patrick, management consultant at Newzoo, said. “For a title launching in November 2026, the scale of demand this far ahead of release is rare, even among the industry’s biggest franchises. Historically, preorder launches of this scale have been associated with the biggest commercial releases.”
“Contrary to social media reports, GTA 6 has not done a billion dollars in preorders 21 weeks out,” Patrick continued. “This is absurd. Given how preorder curves look, nothing ever has and nothing ever will in the near future.
“What the data actually shows is $180 million in digital preorder spend across the U.S. and the five largest European markets in the final week of June, translating to a global opening week of roughly $260 million, with most of the ramp still ahead.
“Run that figure through the plausible band of preorder curves, and GTA 6 is on track to book between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion in week-one launch revenue.
“Even at the most conservative reading, namely that GTA 6 front-loads harder than any major title in our dataset, it lands at a tremendous number by any historical standard.”
It’s worth making a few comparisons here. GTA 5 set records for generating $1 billion in three days after going on sale back in 2013, making it the fastest-selling entertainment product in history (Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame ran it close, making $1 billion at the global box office in five days). GTA 6 seems certain to hit the $1 billion mark faster than both. GTA 5 went on to become the second best-selling video game of all time, with nearly 230 million units sold-in to date. Only Minecraft is ahead of it. Could GTA 6 eventually surpass even Minecraft’s 400 million sales?
GTA 6, due out on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S only on November 19, may well be the most expensive video game ever made, with parent company Take-Two estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far. Earlier this year, Business Insider suggested the eye-watering budget based on industry analyst estimations as part of an interview with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick wouldn’t say how much the company had spent on GTA 6 so far, but did admit “it was expensive.”
To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie’s recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Concord’s initial development deal was around $200 million, according to a report by Kotaku. In 2023, documents submitted as part of the Xbox Federal Trade Commission case accidentally revealed The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon Forbidden West each cost more than $200 million to develop. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter’s life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.
GTA 6 is priced $80 for the Standard Edition — $10 higher than normal for triple A current gen games — and $100 for the Ultimate Edition. There is no physical disc version; rather the box comes with a download code only.
As reported by IGN, Zelnick told an audience at iicon recently that “consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery. How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.”
We’ve got plenty more on GTA 6 preorders, including analyst opinion on what GTA 6’s $80 price point means for other video games, a report on the retailers who are refusing to sell GTA 6 due to the lack of a disc, and the tech expert verdict on the 63 new screenshots.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].