Turns out Rockstar's premium pre-order push isn't just outperforming expectations — it's dominating them.
Last week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed that GTA 6's $100 Ultimate Edition was outselling the standard $80 version, a claim that raised eyebrows even without hard numbers attached. Now a fresh report puts a figure to it, and the scale is bigger than almost anyone predicted.
The Numbers
According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, cited by GamesIndustry.biz, 89% of all GTA 6 pre-orders are for the Ultimate Edition, leaving just 11% going toward the standard release. The split holds fairly steady across platforms — Sensor Tower found 90% of Xbox pre-orders went Ultimate, while on PlayStation the standard edition captured only 11.5% of buyers.
It's worth noting a few caveats: Ultimate Edition content can technically be bought separately from the base game, and premium editions traditionally perform best in the early pre-order window before tapering off. Still, the gap here is unusually wide.
How Unusual Is It?
Karl Kontus, SVP and GM of Video Game Insights at Sensor Tower, told GamesIndustry.biz that premium SKUs tend to lead pre-launch sales simply because the earliest buyers are a game's most dedicated fans. But even accounting for that, Kontus said he's never seen a split this lopsided — typically, premium editions account for just 10-20% of pre-launch sales, with 50% considered an exceptional outcome.
Industry norms would suggest the gap narrows as launch approaches, with a large wave of standard-edition purchases arriving in the final week before release, eventually settling closer to a 50/50 split. Whether that pattern holds for GTA 6 is another matter — as Kontus and virtually everyone else covering this launch keep noting, there's no real precedent for a game at this scale to compare it to.
What It Means for Total Sales
Sensor Tower's data points to roughly 4.3 million pre-orders so far. Extrapolated using standard industry sales trajectories, that could translate to around 40 million copies sold by launch day — north of $2 billion in revenue. Those projections come with a heavy asterisk, though, given how far outside historical norms GTA 6's pre-order behavior already sits.
Notably, this surge has happened before Rockstar's marketing campaign has really ramped up, with several months still to go before launch.
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