Despite the game’s digital-only controversy, Rockstar Games’ GTA 6 is already delivering record-breaking pre-orders. While not confirmed by Rockstar or Take-Two, analysts have claimed that the game has broken records for video game pre-orders months before launch.
According to Newzoo analysts, Grand Theft Auto 6 has managed to sell around $260 million in pre-orders within the first week of pre-orders going live. “That kicks off the strongest pre-order campaign ever recorded,” the analytics firm said.
In the report, Newzoo explained that video game pre-orders are typically a very small part of sales with the majority of players buying on launch day or during launch week. With this in mind, the analytics firm only expects the pre-orders to account for around 5.8% of sales on launch, which is still a relatively high percentage.
With this data, which has been marked against pre-orders of similar titles, Newzoo expects GTA 6 to sell between 37 million and 51 million copies within its first week of sale. At its lowest, this would make GTA 6 the 25th highest selling video game of all time, above The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in the first week. At its highest, this would make the game the 11th highest-selling game of all time above Overwatch, Stardew Valley, and The Sims.
Newzoo explains that Grand Theft Auto 6 is looking likely to be the biggest video game launch of all time, bringing in $3.3 billion in sales by the end of the first week at a minimum. At the highest, this would result in $5.2 billion in just seven days.
“Run that figure through the plausible band of preorder curves, and GTA VI 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,” the analytics firm said.
This is all with the fact that GTA 6 is a console-only launch for 2026, and is localised to just three of the four current-gen consoles: Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PS5. There is no Nintendo Switch 2 release and there is no PC release at the time of writing.
Additionally, GTA 6 is seemingly launching without its online mode, which was the biggest money-maker of the previous game in the series. This means that GTA 6 is leaving additional revenue on the table, although it seems quite obvious that the game’s online mode will make a lot of money when it finally releases.
