Grand Theft Auto VI has already crossed one billion dollars in pre-orders, four days before it reaches shop shelves, putting the game on course for one of the biggest entertainment launches ever recorded, even as the industry around it goes through one of its hardest years.
According to market research firm Sensor Tower, players have already ordered 12 million copies in advance, worth an estimated 1.18 billion dollars. That is far ahead of the 7 million pre-orders Grand Theft Auto V managed before its release in 2013.
Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has made little secret of its confidence. Its chief executive, Strauss Zelnick, said this week that pre-orders were tracking far above the company’s initial expectations.
The wait has been a long one. Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013, so thirteen years will have passed by the time its successor arrives on November 19. In that time the older game has sold close to 235 million copies, making it the second best-selling video game of all time behind Minecraft. The new game has now passed one billion dollars before a single copy has been played.
Part of the excitement comes from where the game is set. Grand Theft Auto VI returns to Vice City, the neon-lit city first made famous by the series in 2002, now placed inside the wider fictional state of Leonida, with two protagonists, Lucia and Jason, at the centre of the story. The game was first announced with a 2025 window, then pushed back in May 2025 to May 26, 2026, and pushed back again in November 2025 to its current date, with Rockstar saying each time that it needed more time to finish the game to the standard players expect. Pre-loading began on November 10, and the game unlocks at midnight local time on November 19. No PC version has been announced.
Consoles Cost More Than Ever
The record pre-orders come with a catch, and it is one that will be felt by every player who still needs the hardware to run the game. Grand Theft Auto VI costs 80 dollars for the Standard Edition and 100 dollars for the Ultimate Edition, making it the most expensive launch in the history of the series. It will run only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, and new models of those consoles now cost between 599 and 899 dollars.
The standard PlayStation 5 now sells for 649.99 dollars, up from 499.99 dollars when it launched, while the more powerful PS5 Pro has climbed from 699.99 dollars in 2024 to 899.99 dollars. The main reason, analysts say, is artificial intelligence. Data centres built to train AI systems are buying up memory chips in huge quantities, pushing up the price of the memory used in consoles, laptops and phones alike. Microsoft said in June that prices for console memory and storage had risen more than two and a half times. Put together, that means a new player who owns neither the game nor a console has to spend somewhere between 580 and more than 1,000 dollars simply to start playing, according to the analytics firm Alinea.
Console Sales Keep Falling
The rising prices are part of the reason console sales themselves have been falling. Spending on gaming hardware in the United States dropped 9 percent to 2.9 billion dollars between January and September, according to the research firm Circana, while sales of the Xbox Series consoles fell 27 percent over the same period.
Analysts expect Grand Theft Auto VI to help, but only by a little. Joost van Dreunen, who studies the games business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, called this a terrible year for hardware and said one game, however large, would reverse that only marginally.
For Pakistani gamers, the squeeze is sharper still. Consoles here are imported, and the price on the shelf already carries shipping, duties and the dealer’s margin on top of the international price, so every dollar added abroad lands heavier at home. A game priced at 80 dollars is itself a serious purchase, and pairing it with a console that has risen by 150 dollars or more since launch puts the full experience out of reach for many of the players who have waited thirteen years for it.
What happens next will be watched closely across the whole industry. If the game opens as strongly as its pre-orders suggest, it could set records that stand for years and give console makers the lift they have been waiting for through the holiday season. The game itself is a triumph of demand, and its billion-dollar head start is already secure. Whether that demand can pull the console market out of its slump, in a year when the machines cost more than ever, will only become clear once the launch weekend is over and the sales figures for the game and the consoles that play it are counted together.
