The 148% pre-order lead stops 3 days early

On 20 October GamesIndustry.biz published Sensor Tower’s launch-aligned pre-order comparison, and the number that travelled was 148 per cent: Grand Theft Auto VI, the firm estimated, was that far ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II at the same distance from launch. The set behind it was Modern Warfare II (2022), Diablo IV and Hogwarts Legacy (2023) and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), with MW2 the strongest of the four — it held more than double Diablo IV’s pre-orders at 45 days out, and went on to a Call of Duty record opening weekend of $800 million. Two limits are printed in the piece itself: the comparison covers digital pre-orders in the United States only, and boxed copies are excluded entirely. The units-and-money figures that travelled beside it are a separate measurement — 6.08 million copies and $594 million as of 13 October, 74 per cent PlayStation against 26 per cent Xbox, with a large majority on the $100 Ultimate Edition.

“At this point from launch” is a date, and it can be calculated. The chart is plotted on one axis measured backwards from each game’s release, with its reference mark at 45 days — that is where the MW2-versus-Diablo number is anchored. Against GTA6’s 19 November 2026 that mark is 5 October 2026. Against Modern Warfare II’s 28 October 2022 it is 13 September 2022. The left edge of the same axis, at 149 days, lands on 23 June 2026 and 1 June 2022, and 23 June is two days before GTA6 pre-orders opened at midnight local on 25 June — so on this axis the GTA6 curve starts at the first minute of its own pre-order window. Two curves of roughly 104 days, each cut 45 days before its own launch. The construction is fair. What it cannot do is make the two campaigns comparable in content, because the cut lands on different things.

On the Modern Warfare II side it lands three days before the beta. Activision’s own schedule put PlayStation early access at 10 a.m. Pacific on 16 September 2022, open to anyone who had pre-ordered, with two further weekends running to 26 September, and its earlier announcement spelled out the exchange: pre-ordering “also grants early access to the game’s Open Beta”. The Call of Duty: Next showcase, which carried the multiplayer reveal, was on 15 September — two days after the cut. So the chart freezes MW2 immediately before the one event its publisher had wired to pre-orders. Nothing equivalent is removed from GTA6’s side, because there is nothing equivalent: Take-Two’s pre-order release of 24 June announces no beta and no demo, and none has been announced since. GTA6’s window instead contains its biggest marketing beat, the 27 August Netflix extended look, which the tracker recorded as a 436 per cent rise in daily pre-orders against the day before.

The GTA6 side carries a second date problem, and it sits inside the same article. The 148 per cent is a value at the chart’s last point, 5 October. The unit and revenue figures printed as its evidence are dated 13 October, eight days past the end of the plotted window. By the next tracker update the same series read 6.45 million copies and $630 million — 27 days before launch, eighteen days after the chart stops. None of that is a contradiction; it is a day-45 ratio and a day-27 count issued in one breath. The consequence is narrower than an error and harder to fix: no published figure describes the gap on 13 October or 23 October, because the chart has no points there, and the part of the curve between day 45 and launch is precisely the part every forecast depends on. For the record, 5 October is also the date Sensor Tower says it revised its model, with the firm describing the effect on global units, revenue and console share as small — a coincidence worth writing down rather than reading.

The scope caveat deserves more than the sentence it gets. GTA6’s boxed edition contains a download code rather than a disc, per Take-Two’s June release, so a digital-only count is close to a complete count for this game. Modern Warfare II shipped discs, so the same instrument captures all of GTA6’s market and part of MW2’s. GamesIndustry.biz’s defence of the sample — the United States is the largest market for most of the titles on the chart, and most of them sold overwhelmingly digitally — supports the direction of the finding rather than the size of the multiple. Money says the multiple is larger than 2.48 either way. $594 million across 6.08 million copies is $97.70 a copy, a figure only a heavy Ultimate Edition mix produces, set against a 2022 shooter whose standard edition was $69.99 and whose Vault Edition was $99.99. Apply the 10 to 20 per cent premium share that Sensor Tower’s Karl Kontus gives for premium editions generally, and MW2 lands near $72.50 to $76.50 a copy, which puts the dollar gap at roughly 3.2 to 3.4 times against 2.48 in units. That last step is this site’s arithmetic on an assumed mix, not a published figure.

None of it changes a purchase. The date is 19 November, the prices are $79.99 and $99.99, pre-load opens on 12 November, and the box still holds a code. What 148 per cent describes is the shape of a campaign rather than the size of demand: one game with a beta three days after the cut and a shooter’s marketing calendar, the other with no beta, a streaming showcase, and a launch trailer that falls ten days after the chart’s final point. A like-for-like version of this comparison would align the marketing beats rather than the days, and nobody has published one. The first official reading arrives on 9 November, when Take-Two reports its second fiscal quarter — company-wide net bookings, no per-title breakdown, ten days before launch. Whether the gap widened or closed between day 45 and day 1 is genuinely unknown, and Kontus has said most pre-orders land in the final week, which is the stretch the chart was built to leave out.