GTA 6 pre-orders are 148% ahead of Modern Warfare 2 — and the $594 million figure explains how
Sensor Tower estimates GTA 6 had 6.08 million digital pre-orders in the United States as of October 13, 2026, worth $594 million, which GamesIndustry.biz reports as 148% ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at the same distance from launch. That works out at $97.70 per copy — a figure only reachable if the $99.99 Ultimate Edition dominates, as Sensor Tower separately estimated.
The short answer
GTA VI had been pre-ordered 6.08 million times in the United States as of October 13, 2026, for an estimated $594 million in revenue. That is the figure Sensor Tower supplied to GamesIndustry.biz in an analysis published on October 20, and it places Rockstar's game 148% ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at the same number of days before launch. GTA VI releases on November 19, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
What Sensor Tower actually measured
The comparison is narrower than the "148%" headline suggests, and the outlet is explicit about it: Sensor Tower's dataset covers digital pre-orders in the United States only. Boxed copies are excluded entirely, as is every market outside the US. GamesIndustry.biz notes the US is the largest market for most of the games on the chart and that most of them sold overwhelmingly digitally, which is why the firm treats the sample as a reasonable proxy rather than a global count.
The chart tracks pre-order trajectories across a defined window — from 149 days to 45 days before launch, which for GTA VI means June 23 to October 5, 2026. The comparison set is Modern Warfare 2 (2022), Diablo 4 (2023), Hogwarts Legacy (2023) and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023), with The Last of Us Part II also appearing in the edition breakdown RockstarINTEL reproduced from the same chart. Every one of those titles is a genuine AAA pre-order performer. None of them is close.
Modern Warfare 2 is the benchmark that matters, because GamesIndustry.biz notes its pre-orders were more than double Diablo 4's at 45 days from launch, and that the game posted Call of Duty's biggest opening weekend at $800 million in 2022. If GTA VI is running 148% ahead of that trajectory, the implied MW2 baseline at the equivalent point is roughly 2.45 million US digital pre-orders — a derived figure, not one the firm published.
Why MW2 is the cleanest yardstick available
There is a methodological reason to prefer Modern Warfare 2 over a more recent Call of Duty, and neither the chart nor the coverage spells it out. MW2 shipped in October 2022 as a full-price purchase on every platform, with no subscription alternative on day one. Black Ops 6, which GamesIndustry.biz notes eventually overtook MW2 as Call of Duty's biggest launch, arrived day-and-date on Game Pass in 2024 — a model that structurally suppresses paid pre-orders.
That makes MW2 the last big Call of Duty whose pre-order curve measures the same thing GTA VI's does: people paying full price up front for a game they cannot play yet. Against any other publisher's recent flagship, the 148% gap would be measuring two different business models at once. Against MW2 it is measuring demand.
Three snapshots, one trajectory
The single number hides a curve, and the curve is where the story is. Sensor Tower's September snapshot, reported at the time by iTechPost via Chinese outlet IT Home, had GTA VI at 5.28 million pre-orders on September 11, split 77% PlayStation and 23% Xbox. The October 13 figure of 6.08 million implies roughly 800,000 additional copies in 32 days, or about 25,000 a day.
RockstarINTEL, working from the same tracker, published a higher number on October 21: 6.45 million copies and an estimated $630 million. The two figures are not in conflict — they are the same series at different cut-off dates. RockstarINTEL attributes $36 million and 380,000 copies to the most recent week alone, which almost exactly bridges the 370,000-copy gap between the two reports.
That recent week also works out at roughly 46,250 copies a day, close to double the September-to-October pace. The launch trailer went live on October 15, inside that window. It is tempting to read the acceleration as the trailer's effect, and it may well be — but no published dataset isolates the trailer from the TV buy, the Miami marketing and the simple fact that the launch is now under five weeks away.
The $97.70 that proves the Ultimate Edition story
Divide $594 million by 6.08 million and you get $97.70 per copy. That number is worth pausing on, because GTA VI has exactly two editions in the US: a $79.99 Standard and a $99.99 Ultimate. A normal AAA premium-edition mix of 10% to 20% would produce revenue of roughly $500 million to $505 million on 6.08 million copies, not $594 million.
The revenue line therefore confirms, independently of any poll or survey, that the Ultimate Edition is taking the overwhelming majority of orders. Sensor Tower put that share at 88.5% on PlayStation and 90% on Xbox in September, against an industry norm of 10-20%. GamesIndustry.biz's October piece reaches the same conclusion in words: "the vast majority of preorders have been for the $100 ultimate edition."
One caveat belongs here. If $594 million is gross revenue at full price, before platform fees, the per-copy maths holds cleanly. If it is net of the roughly 30% console storefront cut, the implied mix changes and the calculation breaks down. Neither GamesIndustry.biz nor Sensor Tower states which basis is used, so the reconstruction above assumes gross.
Measured against GTA V, the gap looks different
GTA V is the comparison Rockstar's parent company will be making internally. On September 17, 2013, that game sold 11.21 million copies and grossed $800 million in its first 24 hours, then passed $1 billion within three days — records that stood for a decade. GTA VI's $594 million in pre-orders 37 days before release is 73% of that entire first-day gross.
Put the other way: after months of pre-orders, GTA VI has booked 54% of the unit volume GTA V achieved on its opening day. RockstarINTEL describes the $630 million figure as "nearly GTA V's 24-hour number", but by Take-Two's own 2013 figures the accurate ratio is about 79% — close, not nearly.
Where that leaves the trajectory is a question of arithmetic, not reporting. If the recent pace of 46,250 copies a day simply held flat for the 29 days remaining, GTA VI would reach roughly 7.79 million pre-orders and $761 million by November 19. Real pre-order campaigns accelerate into launch rather than flatten, so treat that as a floor rather than a forecast — and note that it is still short of GTA V's single-day gross.
Where the 146% comes from
RockstarINTEL's headline on October 21 reads "146% More Than Any Other Game", while the body of the same article says 148%, and both GamesIndustry.biz and GameSpot report 148% from Sensor Tower. The 146% appears to be a headline artefact rather than a second measurement; no source in the chain publishes a 146% figure alongside its own data. Where this site cites the gap, it uses 148%.
What is still not known
Four things remain open. Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has confirmed a single pre-order number, and Take-Two's next earnings call is the only scheduled moment either company might address it. The gross-versus-net basis of the $594 million is undisclosed. Boxed pre-orders and non-US markets are excluded from every figure above, which for a franchise that sells heavily in Europe is a material omission.
And the fastest week on record is not yet a trend: one week at 46,250 copies a day, following a trailer, a television buy and a burst of physical marketing in Miami, describes that week and not the final three. GTA VI launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with the PC version still undated.
