GTA6 added 370,000 pre-orders in a week

Sensor Tower’s pre-order tracking has moved for the first time since this site last read it. The figures now in circulation are 6.45 million copies and $630 million, against 6.08 million and $594 million on 13 October, with the platform split unchanged at 74 per cent PlayStation. Insider Gaming, which reported the numbers, puts the PlayStation side at 4.8 million copies and $468 million, and Xbox at 1.66 million and $162 million. Three qualifiers belong in the first paragraph rather than the last. These are a vendor’s estimates and not a Take-Two disclosure — the publisher has said it will not publish pre-order figures, and its chief executive has called raw pre-order data potentially misleading because an order can be cancelled. The tracker covers the two console storefronts, net of returns, and nothing else; there is no PC version to count and retail codes are outside it. And the exact date of the new snapshot has not been published, which matters for everything below.

What separates this gap from the last one is the ruler rather than the size. Sensor Tower changed its model on 5 October and said at the time that the change moved units, revenue and the console split, so the 800,000 copies between 8 September and 13 October sit either side of a different measuring stick. Both the 13 October snapshot and this one fall after the change. If the new one is dated 20 October, the week adds 370,000 copies, or 52,857 a day, against 22,857 a day across the preceding 35 days. That is 2.31 times the pace. It is also the first week the tracker has recorded faster than the week before it while measured on one basis, which is a narrower claim than it sounds and a more useful one: the 27 August surge, the campaign’s only other step change, sits inside the 8 September book and cannot be isolated the same way.

The only campaign event inside that week is the launch trailer of 15 October, which carried the first full release of Justice’s “Flower in a Hurricane” and the clearest look yet at Jason and Lucia. Nothing in the vendor data attributes the jump to it, and one week is one observation. The honest reading is that the trailer is the only candidate in the window, not that it has been shown to work. What can be said with the numbers is narrower and still worth having: the week produced 370,000 copies against a weekly average of 160,000 over the five weeks before it, so whatever the trailer did, the campaign’s best-funded beat coincided with more than twice the trend. Anyone forecasting the pre-load week of 12 November should treat that as the size of a marketing step change in this campaign — a little over two times — rather than as a floor.

Divide the new book and the price has not moved. $630 million across 6.45 million copies is $97.67 a copy, against $97.70 on 13 October and $97.73 on 8 September. The marginal week is cheaper, $97.30 on $36 million over 370,000 copies, and the two platform totals divide to $97.50 on PlayStation and $97.59 on Xbox. Three readings inside 33 cents, with the newest arrival the lowest, describes a mix that is not shifting. At the two list prices of $79.99 and $99.99 an average of $97.67 implies roughly 88 per cent of buyers taking the Ultimate Edition, which is where the book has sat since August, and where Sensor Tower itself expects the split to fall to about half by launch as ordinary buyers arrive. The week just recorded is evidence against that expectation rather than for it: a wave of late, price-sensitive buyers should have pulled the average down and did not.

Two numbers circulating around this game now change, in opposite directions. Grand Theft Auto V’s 2013 record of roughly 7 million pre-orders was, on the 13 October arithmetic, going to be cleared on 22 November — after launch, and therefore by sales rather than pre-orders. From 6.45 million the 550,000 still needed takes 10.4 days at 52,857 a day, landing on 30 October; even at the old 22,857 it lands on 13 November, six days before launch. Both rates now clear the record before 19 November, and the reason is the base as much as the trend: 370,000 copies arrived in a week when the old rate predicted about 160,000. The 25 million forecast moves the other way, more slowly. The 18.55 million copies between the snapshot and launch work out at 618,333 a day, 11.7 times the new pace; the version in which the last week carries the bulk of it needs about 1.77 million a day, 33 times. On 13 October those two multiples were 22.4 and 81.

None of this is a company figure, and the next scheduled chance at one is 9 November, when Take-Two reports second-quarter results for the period that ends before launch — the last disclosure on the calendar and the first at which an adjective could be replaced by a number. The measurement to watch is the week to 27 October. If 370,000 was the trailer rather than a new baseline, the next snapshot returns toward 160,000, the 7 million mark goes back to depending on launch-day sales, and the “most of it arrives in the final week” theory keeps its 33-fold problem. If it holds, the required ramp keeps halving — from 22.4 times to 11.7 in six days — while never arriving. Both of those are testable within a week, which is more than can be said for the forecast itself.