Take-Two says GTA 6 pre-orders are "far in excess" of what it expected, and the game's finished

GTA 6 pre-orders are "tracking far in excess of our initial expectations", Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick told investors on Monday night. It was the company's last earnings call before the game comes out on 19 November, and he also said, for the first time on the record, that Rockstar is done making it.

"Right now, Rockstar has completed the development of GTA VI," Zelnick said, adding that it "may not come as a surprise to you since we're 10 days away from the release." From here, he said, the job is making sure Take-Two does "an A+ job technically" getting it to people.

The quarter itself was a bit soft

The numbers in the results are for July to September, so there isn't a single GTA 6 sale in them. Take-Two's release puts net bookings (the figure the company steers by) at $1.60 billion, down 18% from $1.96 billion a year earlier. That's below the $1.62 to $1.67 billion it had guided, and on the call Zelnick put the miss on NBA 2K27, saying the game's launch window was "unusually busy". He also said the Grand Theft Auto series beat its forecast for the quarter.

Spending inside games people already own, which Take-Two calls recurrent consumer spending, fell 9% to $1.3 billion. GTA Online still lives in that bucket, and its last big update was the Kortz Center Heist in July.

The forecast stays at $8 billion

Take-Two kept its forecast for the year to March 2027 at $8.0 to $8.2 billion in net bookings. Some early write-ups called that a raise. It isn't. The release says "reiterating", and it's the same range the company gave in May and again in August.

Why not bump it, with pre-orders going that well? An analyst asked exactly that, and Zelnick's answer was that "we tend to avoid claiming success before it occurs." He said they'll be "very happy to describe what's going on" once they've got some time after launch behind them, and that "there is really no need to update numbers right now."

For October to December, the quarter GTA 6 lands in, Take-Two expects net bookings of $3.35 to $3.5 billion. That's more than double this quarter.

No pre-order number, but Sensor Tower has one

Take-Two didn't give a figure. CFO Lainie Goldstein called the pre-order level "extraordinary", and the release says pre-orders are "continuing to reach unprecedented levels", but that's as far as it went.

The closest thing to a number is still Sensor Tower's. Its estimate as of 3 November, reported by Dexerto and Pixel Twelve, is about 7.71 million digital pre-orders on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, roughly 5.74 million of them on PlayStation and 1.97 million on Xbox, worth about $751 million. That's store data modelled by an analytics firm, it's digital only, and Take-Two hasn't confirmed any of it. It was about 6 million in mid-October, which is in our earlier look at the Sensor Tower data.

Marketing, PC and online

On marketing, Zelnick said the Extended Look that premiered on Netflix became the platform's most-watched title that week, "drawing in 31 million consumers in just its first 4 days." Goldstein said most of the marketing spend lands around launch, in this current quarter.

PC got the usual non-answer. Zelnick said GTA 6 "is available on 2 consoles when it launches on November 19", and nobody announced anything for PC.

Online was the same. Zelnick said Rockstar will keep supporting GTA Online on GTA 5, and asked about the future he said Rockstar "will focus on what comes next, and we'll announce that in the fullness of time." So nothing on an online mode for GTA 6, which ships without one.

That's pretty much the call we expected in our preview: date held, no sales number, careful wording on PC and online. Zelnick's promised to talk once the game's been out a while, so the first real sales figure should come from Take-Two after 19 November.