89% Of GTA 6 Preorders Are For The $100 Ultimate Edition

An Unprecedented Premium Split

Digital intelligence firm Sensor Tower reports that 89% of GTA 6 preorders are going toward the $100 Ultimate Edition rather than the $80 standard edition, according to GamesIndustry.biz. The split holds steady across platforms, with 90% of Xbox buyers and 88.5% of PlayStation buyers choosing the premium option.

That echoes Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick’s recent comment to CNBC that preorders were “skewing more to the premium edition,” though Take-Two itself has so far declined to share exact preorder figures, with Zelnick saying he didn’t want to mislead investors before the full sales picture is clear.

The scale of premium split caught Sensor Tower analysts off guard.

“I have never seen a 90% premium share before,” said Karl Kontus, SVP and GM of Video Game Insights at Sensor Tower.

“A 50% premium share during preorders is a great number. Typical premium shares for games tend to be at around 10-20%.” He expects that share to decline as more casual buyers pick up the game, though he still expects it to stay well above the industry norm.

Why The Ultimate Edition Is Winning

Kontus points to pricing and content as the likely drivers. “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,” he said. The Ultimate Edition includes perks like vehicle customization shops, additional vehicles and weapons, and access to a custom mod shop not available otherwise.

“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,”

Kontus said, adding he was “kind of surprised” Rockstar didn’t push pricing even further with a $150 tier.

Kontus also expects the standard-to-Ultimate split to shift closer to 50/50 as launch approaches and the marketing push widens the buyer pool beyond dedicated fans. “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 said. “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.”

What It Could Mean For Total Sales

Sensor Tower’s tracker currently puts total GTA6 preorders at 4.3 million, split 77% PlayStation to 23% Xbox. Kontus is cautious about extrapolating that into a final number, noting that “normal” preorder trajectories would put the total near 40 million by launch, but that GTA6 doesn’t behave normally. “The zeitgeist around the game is so high that it warps everything,” he said.

He suspects preorders are frontloaded and that the real total by launch may land closer to 25 million, still what he calls “an unprecedented preorder performance.” For comparison, he notes Cyberpunk 2077 had announced 8 million preorders by its own launch. Twenty-five million preorder units, Kontus estimates, would translate to roughly $2 billion in sales before the game even launches, enough to cover its development costs and most of its marketing budget outright.

For comparison, GTA 5 has sold 230 million copies to date, a number GTA 6 will eventually have to surpass.

Zelnick himself described the preorder numbers to GamesIndustry.biz as “unprecedented and astonishing,” while cautioning that “they are also so unprecedented that we just don’t know how it’ll translate into sales.” That same reluctance to speculate showed up when Zelnick recently defended GTA 6 launching without physical discs, noting Take-Two’s business is already “well over 90% digitally distributed.”

Prior to preorders opening in June, analyst estimates for GTA6’s first-year sales ranged from 30 to 35 million units up to over 50 million, with Enders Analysis’ Gareth Sutcliffe suggesting a “blow out sales scenario” could push the game as high as 60 million.