GTA 6 Pre-Orders Reportedly Skew Heavily Towards PS5, and the Xbox Denial Quietly Agrees

Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge and the most sourced reporter on Microsoft’s gaming business, published the claim in his Notepad newsletter on September 24: “Sources at Xbox tell me that GTA 6 pre-orders are heavily skewed towards PS5, ringing yet more alarm bells.” The phrase about alarm bells is doing the work there. It lands in a stretch where Xbox has confirmed another round of job cuts, hardware revenue has declined for three straight years, and memory prices are pushing console costs the wrong way. A generational third-party game selling disproportionately on the rival platform is exactly the kind of signal executives watch.

None of this says GTA 6 will sell poorly on Xbox. It says the split between the two consoles matters, both for Microsoft’s hardware story and for where the enormous online audience settles after launch.

Microsoft did not leave it alone. Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball answered Warren directly in public: “Tom, we are very happy with GTA VI pre-orders. The title is breaking records for Xbox, we expect even more records will be broken throughout the fall, and our internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market.” In replies to other accounts he went further, calling the report “false” and “not true”, per NME’s write-up.

Read the statement twice and the denial gets thinner. Breaking records for Xbox is easy when the platform has never had a launch this big. The load-bearing clause is the last one: Xbox’s share of pre-orders matches its share of the console market. PS5 has sold close to 100 million consoles, the Series X and S families sit around an estimated 35 million, and Microsoft stopped reporting hardware numbers years ago. A pre-order share that mirrors that installed base is, by definition, heavily skewed towards PS5. Warren asked Ball what Xbox’s share of the console market actually is. That question has not been answered.

This is the second round of the same fight. In June, third-party estimates based on early retail data put the pre-order split at roughly eight to one in PS5’s favour, and Microsoft pushed back on those figures too. An eight to one split would be far beyond the installed base gap, so both things can be true at once: the June numbers may have overstated it, and the skew Warren’s sources describe can still be real. Ball’s market-share framing concedes a roughly three to one tilt without using a single number.

There is also an honest caveat for the Xbox side: retail workers keep reporting that the cheaper Series S sells steadily as a second console, and a machine bought in October to play GTA 6 in November never shows up in September pre-order data.

Sony is not being subtle about pressing the advantage. GTA 6 retail boxes and UK posters carry “plays best on PS5” messaging, two official DualSense controllers arrive on launch day, and the game carries a PS5 Pro Enhanced badge, with both console families confirmed to run at 30fps. Microsoft’s counter so far is Game Pass economics and the Series S price point, not GTA 6 marketing, because Sony owns those rights.

For launch week the platform split is mostly a scoreboard story. The number that matters more is the one nobody disputes: pre-orders on both platforms are tracking towards the biggest entertainment launch ever recorded, and every alarm bell in this story is about who hosts the party, not whether it happens.