GTA VI pre-loads open as Take-Two says pre-orders beat its expectations

Grand Theft Auto VI is ready to download. Rockstar Games opened pre-loading on Tuesday for everyone who pre-ordered the game digitally. It launches in nine days, on 19 November, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

The day before, its publisher Take-Two Interactive reported its quarterly results and said pre-orders keep climbing. It kept its forecast of $8bn to $8.2bn in net bookings for the year to March 2027. That figure rests largely on GTA VI.

“The launch of Grand Theft Auto VI is ten days away and, with pre-orders continuing to reach unprecedented levels, we expect to deliver an historic year for our company,” said Strauss Zelnick, chairman and chief executive of Take-Two.

Zelnick went further in an interview with Variety , but would not give numbers.

“Running far in excess of our expectations,” Zelnick told Variety of the game’s presales.

Sensor Tower estimates about 7.71 million digital pre-orders worldwide as of 3 November, Reuters reported . The standard edition costs $79.99 and the Ultimate Edition $99.99.

Take-Two’s net bookings fell 18% to $1.6bn in the three months to September. A year earlier they were $1.96bn. Analysts had expected $1.67bn, according to Reuters. Revenue fell to $1.5bn from $1.77bn, and the net loss narrowed to $54m from $133.9m.

Take-Two raised its revenue forecast for the year to between $7.98bn and $8.18bn. It had expected $7.9bn to $8.1bn. Its shares rose 4% in extended trading, Reuters reported. For the October to December quarter, which includes the launch, it expects net bookings of $3.35bn to $3.5bn.

“We’re days away from the launch of ‘GTA VI’, and we tend to avoid claiming success before it occurs,” Zelnick said on the earnings call.

NBA 2K27, released in September, sold below Take-Two’s forecasts. Zelnick told IGN it was still the second-best launch in the series, with 4 million units sold. He said some players may have held off on new games before GTA VI. He also told IGN the game will not be delayed again.

Rockstar said in its pre-load announcement that GTA VI targets 30 frames per second on both consoles. The PS5 Pro adds PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) and ray-traced shadows.

The game will also stream through Xbox Cloud Gaming to Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles. The stream uses Xbox Series S graphics settings. That lets owners of the older Xbox One play without a new console. Xbox said in a blog post that GTA VI is the most pre-ordered title ever on the Microsoft Store. Streaming starts at 1am ET on 19 November.

Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma called the cloud deal a first step in a post on X .

“The first step in our new 10-year strategic partnership with Take-Two,” Sharma wrote.

Zelnick told IGN he sees AI-made copies of games as a creative problem, not a financial threat to the business. He said Take-Two guards its intellectual property closely. He was asked about Anthropic’s move to stop Claude from helping recreate existing games . Every company should protect intellectual property, he said. He called it ironic for AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI to infringe other people’s work while expecting their own to be protected.

Take-Two has said before that GTA VI was made without generative AI . Pre-orders opened in June.

Some employers are already planning for 19 November. Logitech is giving its 7,000 employees a day off to play video games, Fortune reported . It will turn its offices into a gaming lounge on launch day.