Rockstar may have recouped the majority of GTA 6’s budget within one hour of pre-orders going live, as it sparks a rise in Take-Two shares.
GTA 6 pre-orders opened last week, but neither Rockstar nor publisher Take-Two has provided any advanced sales statistics.
There have been some estimates about the sales divide between the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions, and some bizarre scalper behaviour on eBay, but no clear indication of how many people have actually pre-ordered so far.
While we’re in the dark in regards to units sold, a new report suggests Rockstar and Take-Two made an eye-watering amount of cash within one hour of pre-orders going live.
This comes from an interview with University Of Virginia business professor Anthony Palomba, who cites analysts that calculated GTA 6 made $1 billion (£755 million) in revenue ‘in the first hour alone’ after pre-orders went up at midnight on Thursday, June 25.
When asked why pre-orders matter so much for games like GTA 6, Palomba said: ‘Third, and most overlooked, they are a signal to financial markets. Take-Two shares rose almost 3% in early trading when pre-orders opened, and some analysts modeled as much as $1 billion in revenue in the first hour alone.
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‘For a listed company, the pre-order window functions as an investor communication event as much as a sales channel.’
If true, this means GTA 6 may have recouped the majority of its budget within one hour. As reported last month, GTA 6 is estimated to have cost between $1 billion to $1.5 billion (£1.13 billion) so far. Other estimates have gone as high as $3 billion, but even that seems like it will be easily justified by overall sales.
In comparison, GTA 5 generated more than $1 billion in retail sales after three days in 2013. As of this year, the game has sold 230 million copies and is the second highest-selling game of all time, behind Minecraft.
The higher price and demand for GTA 6 suggests the sequel will easily dwarf GTA 5’s launch, although it may not necessarily beat it’s overall sales, which are the result of going 13 years, and three separate generations of console, without a sequel.
Although perhaps GTA 6 will go even longer without a new mainline entry, after it launches this year, on November 19.
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