The digital intelligence firm Sensor Tower reports that 89% of preorders for GTA6 are for the $100 ultimate edition rather than the $80 standard edition.
The percentages are similar for both of the game’s launch platforms, with 90% of buyers on Xbox plumping for the ultimate edition, compared with 88.5% on PlayStation.
The figures back up Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick’s recent statement in an interview with CNBC that preorders are “skewing more to the premium edition.” But just how much more they are skewing towards the ultimate edition came as a surprise to Karl Kontus, SVP and GM of Video Game Insights at Sensor Tower.
He points out to GamesIndustry.biz that special editions “always tend to perform well during the preorder period,” because games tend to be preordered by their most dedicated fans, who are also more likely to want a premium edition. “That being said, I have never seen a 90% premium share before,” he says. “A 50% premium share during preorders is a great number. Typical premium shares for games tend to be at around 10–20%.”
He expects the share of sales for the GTA6 ultimate edition to decline over time as more casual players buy the game, “but it’s likely it’ll stay significantly above the industry standard.”
Kontus thinks that at launch, the split between the $80 standard edition and the $100 ultimate edition will largely be determined by how many casual players the GTA6 marketing machine can pull in ahead of the release date.
“I have never seen a 90% premium share before”
“The vast majority of the marketing campaign hasn’t kicked off yet, and most of the preorders will come in the last week or so pre-launch,” he says. “I expect the split for these to be much closer to 50/50. That being said, GTA6 is very hard to forecast, given it lives in a league of its own. There is no benchmark for how this game will perform from here.”
As for why the ultimate edition is performing so well, Kontus thinks the pricing has a lot to do with it. “The difference between $80 (already higher than the industry standard $70 we see today) and $100 isn’t that big, and the $100 SKU comes with a lot of additional content.” The ultimate edition includes a long list of exclusive perks, including access to vehicle customisation shops.
“Sometimes the premium SKUs are just filler content to justify a higher price, but the GTA6 premium SKU comes with a meaningful amount of vehicles, weapons, and even a custom mod shop that you wouldn’t get otherwise,” says Kontus. “For a lot of people, this is the one ‘must buy’ game this year, and they will want to make the most of it. I’m actually kind of surprised they didn’t do a $150 SKU – feels like money left on the table (but also fewer players being angry as a result).”
In terms of just how many units GTA6 will sell in total at launch, Kontus says it’s difficult to predict. “If we used any ‘normal’ preorder trajectories, the current 4 million preorders would mean 40 million+ preorders by launch. However, as Strauss Zelnick himself pointed out in a recent interview, it’s incredibly hard to say what’s ‘normal’ for GTA6. The zeitgeist around the game is so high that it warps everything.”
Zelnick recently told GamesIndustry.biz that the level of pre-orders was “unprecedented and astonishing” but that “they are also so unprecedented that we just don’t know how it’ll translate into sales.”
Kontus suspects that the preorders are fairly frontloaded, meaning they will fall well short of the 40 million mark, and that “actual preorders might land more in the 25 million ballpark,” which he says would still be “an unprecedented preorder performance.”
“For comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 announced 8 million preorders by launch,” he says. “25 million preorder units would mean circa $2 billion in sales by the time the game actually launches – immediately paying for its development cost and probably for the vast majority of the marketing as well.”
Sensor Tower has created a GTA6 sales tracker, which currently shows the game has been preordered 4.3 million times, with 77% of preorders on PlayStation versus 23% on Xbox.
Ahead of the launch of preorders for GTA6 in June, GamesIndustry.biz asked a range of analysts for their thoughts on how many units GTA6 would sell in its first year. The estimates ranged from 30-35 million to over 50 million units, with Gareth Sutcliffe of Enders Analysis suggesting that a “blow out sales scenario” could even see the game closing in on 60 million sales.
