Xbox says GTA VI pre-orders are 'breaking records for XBOX' — the numbers behind the claim
Xbox's Matthew Ball said on 24 September 2026 that GTA VI pre-orders are 'breaking records for XBOX' and match Xbox's share of the console market, answering a Verge report on a split 'heavily skewed toward PS5'. Sensor Tower (via IT Home, reported by iTechPost) counts 5.28m pre-orders on 11 September: 4.06m (77%) on PS5, 1.21m (23%) on Xbox, against a 27.2% Xbox install-base share per VGChartz.
Yes — but "record" here means a record for Xbox
Both claims can be true at once, and that is precisely what makes this week's exchange worth reading closely. On 24 September 2026, Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball publicly rejected the framing of a Verge report published the same day, which described GTA VI pre-orders as "heavily skewed toward PS5". Ball replied that the game is "breaking records for XBOX" and that "our internal analysis shows our share of preorders to be matching our share of the console market" (IGN). The entire dispute therefore rests on one definition: how big is Xbox's share of the console market? Per the only figures the public has, it is about 27% — and the estimated pre-order share is 23%.
What Xbox was answering
The report came from The Verge's Tom Warren, inside a broader piece on this week's layoffs and studio reorganisation at Xbox. Warren wrote that the PS5's dominance over GTA VI pre-orders was "ringing yet more alarm bells" about Xbox as a platform, citing sources within Microsoft who described the split as heavily weighted to PlayStation (IGN). The timing matters: on 22 September, Xbox announced it was eliminating 268 roles across Halo Studios, other first-party studios and the XGS management layer, extending a "reset" that began with July's cuts (Xbox Wire, The Verge).
The two figures the claim rests on
The first is the hardware base. VGChartz estimates put the PS5 at 94.09 million units sold through to consumers and the Xbox Series X|S at 35.21 million at the end of July 2026, compiled alongside Sony's own disclosures by Icon-Era. Sony, which is the only one of the two manufacturers still publishing numbers, reported 95.3 million PS5 units shipped as of 30 June 2026. On a two-platform basis that gives PlayStation 72.8% of the generation's hardware and Xbox 27.2%.
The second is the pre-order split. Sensor Tower's estimate, relayed by IT Home and reported by iTechPost, puts cumulative GTA VI pre-orders at 5.28 million as of 11 September 2026 — roughly 4.06 million (77%) on PS5 against 1.21 million (23%) on Xbox. The same tracker had 3.15 million PS5 pre-orders against 930,000 on Xbox through 20 July, for about $395 million in net revenue at that point (iTechPost). Ball did not give a single figure of his own.
Relative to its own install base, Xbox is not over-performing
Read together, those two datasets make the claim checkable — and the check returns "in line", not "ahead". Xbox's 23% share of pre-orders sits about four points below its 27.2% share of the two platforms' hardware base; the skew is slightly worse than the raw install base implies, not better. Expressed per console, the gap is clearer still: 4.06 million pre-orders against 94.09 million PS5s is 4.3% of the installed base, while 1.21 million against 35.21 million Xbox Series consoles is 3.4% — PS5 owners are pre-ordering at a rate roughly 26% higher. Pre-orders are not a strict share of owners, but it is the apples-to-apples comparison Ball's own framing invites.
Where "matching market share" can still be true
There is a version of the Xbox argument that survives the data, and it is geographic. Xbox's installed base is heavily American: 21.91 million of its 35.21 million consoles (62%) are in the Americas, against 39% of the PS5's units, per the same VGChartz estimates. In that region Xbox holds 37.4% of the two-platform base, versus 20.8% in Europe and 8.5% in Japan — where it has sold 710,000 consoles in total. A pre-order mix weighted towards the United States can therefore match Xbox's American share while the worldwide split still lands at 77/23. Circana's Mat Piscatella recorded US Xbox Series unit sales up 86% year-on-year in June 2026, albeit from a very weak 2025 base.
The second "record" claim in three months, still no number
This is not the first time Xbox has used the word. On 27 June 2026, IGN's affiliate-link tracking claimed PlayStation was pre-ordering at eight times the Xbox rate; an Xbox spokesperson told Windows Central that the data "doesn't represent pre-order data" and that the company had seen "record orders" (TechSpot). Ball used the same argument on 24 September with one addition: a market-share benchmark, which is checkable. Neither statement came with a unit figure, and Microsoft has not disclosed Xbox Series sales in years (IGN).
What is confirmed, and what is not
Confirmed: Ball's statement, The Verge's reporting, the 268 job cuts, and Sony's 95.3 million shipped PS5s. Not confirmed: any official platform split. Rockstar and Take-Two have published no pre-order breakdown, so every ratio above comes from a third-party estimate (iTechPost). For scale, when GTA V launched on 17 September 2013, VGChartz had the PS3 at 77,313,472 units and the Xbox 360 at 77,311,669 — a gap of 1,803 consoles, with Microsoft announcing 80 million Xbox 360s a month later (VGChartz, GameSpot). Back then, "matching the console market" meant splitting GTA V roughly in half; in 2026 it means 23%.
