Sony and Microsoft Both Say It: GTA 6 Is the Most Pre-Ordered Game Their Stores Have Ever Had

Platform holders do not usually hand out superlatives for a third-party game. On November 10 both of them did. Tim Turi, content communications manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment, opened the PlayStation Blog’s pre-load post with a sentence that will be quoted for years: “Grand Theft Auto VI is now the most pre-ordered game in the history of PlayStation Store.” He tied the record directly to the schedule, writing that “given this unprecedented demand” Sony had worked with Rockstar to let players start downloading nine days early, and he confirmed the launch itself is a rolling midnight by country, beginning at 12:00am NZDT.

Microsoft’s version arrived on Xbox Wire a few hours later, buried under a headline about cloud gaming. GTA 6 is “the most pre-ordered title of all time on the Microsoft Store”, the post says, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma lifted the line onto X with a frame of her own: “Today marks the first step in our new 10-year strategic partnership with Take-Two. GTA VI, already the most pre-ordered game ever on Microsoft Store, will be playable on Xbox One through cloud gaming when it launches on November 19.” Game Informer picked up both statements the same afternoon.

Read the two sentences closely and the limits are built in. PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store are digital storefronts, so the records say nothing about the boxed copies sitting in warehouses for Thursday. Neither company attached a number, a comparison title or a time window. The claim is a ranking, not a count, and Take-Two, which told investors a day earlier that pre-orders were “far in excess” of its plan, has still not put a figure on anything. Our report on that call covers why.

The only numbers in circulation come from Sensor Tower, whose public tracker estimates digital pre-orders from storefront data rather than anything Rockstar shares. Its November 10 reading is 9.69 million copies and about $942 million in spending, split 7.23 million and $703 million on PS5 against 2.46 million and $239 million on Xbox Series X and S. That is a 75 to 25 split, almost exactly where it sat when we covered the 6.45 million reading in October.

The jump of nearly two million in seven days is the detail worth sitting with. Pre-load week, the Take-Two call, a thirty-second trailer and the first official frame-rate statement all landed inside that window, and the storefronts moved the game to the front of every console dashboard. The comparison doing the rounds is Cyberpunk 2077, whose 8 million pre-orders CD Projekt announced in 2020. On the tracker’s numbers GTA 6 passed that some time in the first week of November, though the two figures are not like for like: CD Projekt counted boxed and digital copies together, and Sensor Tower counts digital alone.

Treat the estimate as an estimate. Sensor Tower models store activity from the outside, its figures have moved with each weekly refresh, and the average price per copy it implies, roughly $97, only works if the Ultimate Edition is doing most of the lifting. None of that undermines the direction. Two platform holders have now said the same thing in public on the same day, and the one independent dataset agrees with them.

Microsoft’s post was really about cloud gaming, and it answered the question we flagged after the Pre-Load Now trailer: what Xbox One access actually requires. Streaming for GTA 6 begins at 1am ET on November 19 across Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S, running at Xbox Series S graphics settings. The gate has changed too. From November 11, in supported markets, players can buy cloud playtime and stream supported games they own without a Game Pass subscription, which Microsoft had not offered before. You still need to buy the game.

The fixed start time is odd for a game that otherwise unlocks at midnight in every country. Taken at face value, 1am Eastern is 6am in London and 8am in Vilnius on the 19th, hours after consoles in those cities have gone live, while on the US West Coast it lands at 10pm on the 18th. Whether Microsoft means a single global switch or has simply quoted its home time zone is not spelled out, and we will update our unlock-time guide once the first stream appears. The same post says GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2 and other Take-Two titles come to Xbox Cloud Gaming in the coming months, which is the partnership Sharma was pointing at. For a wider look at the pre-order editions and what each store bundles, GTA VI Mods keeps a running guide.

Sony attached a video instead. The PS5 Features Trailer runs 49 seconds and is a PlayStation production rather than a Rockstar one, cut from footage we have mostly seen before with text cards over it: adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, Tempest 3D audio, and the controller speaker carrying radio chatter and police dispatch. One card reads “All eyes on suspect’s vehicle” over a helicopter searchlight. It is the first time either platform holder has described how the game uses its hardware, even if the description is a list of nouns.

Put the day together and the shape of launch week is set. Sony has the bigger share and the DualSense pitch, Microsoft has the Xbox One audience and a cloud deal it wants to be seen signing, and Rockstar has said nothing beyond its newswire. The record is real on both stores. The number behind it, when Take-Two finally gives one, will be the first figure in this story that is not an estimate.