Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has seemingly corroborated reports of GTA 6 pre-orders coming in at an unmatched scale.
Following the game’s price announcement, gaming analysts reported that GTA 6 pre-orders already resulted in the “strongest pre-order campaign on record”. Analysts estimated that millions of copies have already been sold with predictions lining up for the open-world game to sell as many as 51 million copies on launch day.
Unfortunately, Zelnick is not keen to report official pre-order numbers for the latest Grand Theft Auto game at the time of writing. However, giving credence to analysts’ prior reports, the CEO confirmed that the game’s pre-order sales are essentially unparalleld.
In a discussion with Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, Zelnick confirmed that the scale of pre-orders are “astonishing”, “unprecedented”, and “exceptional”. While the current pre-order period has already “vastly” exceeded Take-Two’s predictions, they don’t want to publicly release the scale of pre-orders as they worry it could be “misleadifng”.
“We can’t tell whether they mean anything,” Zelnick told Bloomberg. “The massive demand for pre-orders we’ve seen to date could reflect a pull forward of sales that otherwise would materialise in the fullness of time.”
He continued: “I’ve reminded people that we simply don’t know the demand curve because it’s just never happened before. Given that, we think the raw numbers could potentially be misleading in a direction we wouldn’t feel good about.”
While pre-orders are higher than expected, despite the complete lack of a true physical version, Zelnick does not expect launch day sales to be higher than expected. Instead, with the higher-than-usual pre-orders, the CEO expects everything to even out to their original sales predictions upon launch day.
“We believe the install base around launch time will reflect our original expectations. The only thing that will cause me to be concerned, not worried, but concerned, would be if we somehow felt that number was going to be smaller than we thought. But that isn’t the case,” he said.
Right now, by industry analysts not Zelnick himself, GTA 6 is expected to be the largest entertainment launch in history. Coming over a decade after its predecessor, the open world crime game has been primed to eclipse the sales of Rockstar’s already historic past, even without the launch of a PC port or an online mode on release day.
Considering the longevity of the last Grand Theft Auto, GTA V, it’s likely that GTA 6 will continue to remain a high seller for years, especially after the release of its online mode which will likely involve heavy microtransactions. With gaming bigger than ever, there is no doubt that the launch of Rockstar’s latest will break records everywhere.
