Grand Theft Auto VI Pre-Orders 'Vastly' Beat Expectations, Take-Two CEO Tells Me

Hello, OneTakeShrier here, and today we're talking about Grand Theft Auto 6. Could it be the biggest video game of all time? Maybe. Could it be the biggest entertainment launch of all time? Possibly. It's funny, I was just I was talking to someone the other day about um the Odyssey and the new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, which are both big hits, both massive box office successes that are going to be over a billion dollars each, and I think there's a very good chance that those two movies, with all the kind of cultural um influence that they've had and sales figures and all the all the buzz surrounding them, that the two of them their lifetime box office revenue numbers combined will still be less than Grand Theft Auto 6 makes in a single day, or at least its first week on sale. Think about that for a second. Um as as as the uh the boomers might say, "Wow, video games, they've come a long way since Pac-Man." So, let's talk about GTA 6 today, August 7th, 2026. Uh

Take-Two Interactive, which is the publisher of GTA 6, Take-Two is the company that is based in New York and owns Rockstar Games. Rockstar is a development subsidiary of Take-Two. Um Rockstar, of course, makes Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption and used to make other things like Bully and and uh uh uh what's called? Um uh Max Payne 3 they made once. Uh they used they used to LA Noire, they made other things back in the day, but now they're a one-game studio. Um with thousands of people all just kind of like channeled into a single game, which is a little bit little bit bonkers. Anyway, um so, Take-Two had their earnings call this morning, and earnings calls are always good for those of us who enjoy reading numbers and seeing data and updates on the state of the video game industry, and today's was no exception. It was really interesting. Um first and foremost, game's not delayed, it's still coming out November 19th, 3 months away, so hey, don't worry about it slipping again. In video games, you never know what might happen. I've seen crazier

things. I believe it was a Cyberpunk 2077 that was delayed after they announced that it had gone gold, aka what people say when a game is actually finished and uh handing off to you uh to be submitted and pressed into discs. So So, never say never until it's actually November 19th. Um you know, I think Okay, I think it's if it's like November 12th, I think it's safe to say that there's no more chance of a delay. But hey, you never know. Um And uh they also shared some interesting things about the game uh and about their numbers, of course. They always talk about their revenue and whether or not they meet estimates and so on and so forth. Um Fun fact, by the way, if you're interested in the inner workings of the stock market, um what matters during these earnings calls and when companies report earnings, what matters the most to investors and people who are watching these things is not the numbers themselves, but whether the numbers beat or miss or hit the estimates that Wall Street is expecting for those numbers. It's all about

reality versus expectations and how that is reflected, and that is usually the number one kind of indicator of where the stock price is going to go when these earnings hit. Although in GT In In Take-Two's case, really all that matters is GTA 6. And the big question is what is going to happen with GTA 6 sales numbers and what do pre-orders look like? Because Take-Two opened up pre-orders for the game on June 25th, and so we now have a month and a half worth of data on that. Um we heard some numbers. Uh Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called GTA 6 pre-order Or sorry, we didn't hear numbers, but we heard some words. Uh Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called uh GTA 6 pre-orders {quote} "unprecedented and astonishing and exceptional." And he pretty much did everything except for say the numbers. I spoke to him this morning and I asked him why he didn't save the numbers, which I will share in a little bit. But first, I actually want to share something that I think is

really interesting when it comes to Take-Two's data. I'm going to pull up a screen here. Let's see. Okay, so this is interesting. This is not 100% related to GTA, but it's still really interesting and I think shows you where companies like Take-Two have gone and what the future looks like for these game publishers. So, uh you might remember a few weeks ago I did a video about why these game companies are always on the hunt for {quote} live service games, games that can be monetized indefinitely and generate recurring revenue for the companies behind them. Um Take-Two is no exception. They have GTA Online and they have NBA 2K, which are their two biggest live service games in the console space. And then they also own Zynga, which is the maker of a whole bunch of uh uh mobile games that are just kind of current like always generating recurring revenue. Like Toon Blast is their big one these days. Um so, I want to share one figure that I think is interesting. So, in fiscal year 2026, uh their last fiscal year, uh they generated um $6.7 billion

in total revenue. Um of that number, 5.2 billion was recurrent customer spending and 1.4 billion was full game and other sales. In other words, about 22% of their revenue coming in for the most recent fiscal year was from actually selling games, selling copies of their video games, whereas uh the other 78% $5.2 billion is coming from people spending money within their games, not to buy their games, but spending money on microtransactions in 2K and GTA and the mobile games. So, uh very different business model than uh the way the video game industry looked 10, 15 years ago when you just made a game, you put it in a box, and then you sold it. So, just a fun little fact, and it's uh interesting to know that uh right now Take-Two is only talking about GTA 6 in terms of the single-player portion, which will not presumably have recurring revenue. I don't think they're putting microtransactions in the single-player

game, um and not GTA Online. They have not talked at all, and they are not planning to talk anytime soon about what the new GTA Online will look like, and what that recurring spend will look like, which um uh reportedly uh according to some leaked numbers, the current version of GTA Online, the one that is associated associated with Grand Theft Auto 5, brings in about half a billion dollars per year. Half a billion dollars per year, 13 years after it launched, which is just an unfathomable amount of money. So, um this next one, all bets are off. But right now we're just talking about the single-player game. So, okay. So, we we know pre-orders went up. We know that they're unprecedented. So, I I talked to you Strauss Zelnick this morning, like I mentioned, CEO Take-Two. I said to him, "Hey, okay. Well, you're not going to tell us the numbers, but will you tell us did they beat your internal forecast?" Um he said, "They are much higher than their internal forecast. They vastly beat them." So, I said to him, "Well, why can't you just share the numbers?"

And he said something interesting, which is he said that like I'm going to read a quote for him, which is quote, "And this is all in a Bloomberg story that you can read. I'll put that in the show notes." He said, quote, "We can't tell whether they mean anything. It could be a situation where it's just demand pulled forward because of enthusiasm, but no real change in the actual number." Um he said, "We never want to mislead people. We've said they're exceptional, they're really great, but at the same time, I've reminded people that we simply don't know the demand curve because it's just never happened before." And he went on to say that the raw numbers could be misleading. I asked him to clarify that a little bit cuz I wasn't 100% following what he was saying. And he essentially said that the point that he's making is that this demand for pre-orders might not reflect that sales are going to be some exponentially higher number than they expected, but it might just reflect that demand is being pulled forward. In other words, the people who would have bought the game on day one or after launch are just pre-ordering it instead of buying it then. So, if they expected to sell, I

don't know, 30 million copies on that first week, and they have however many pre-orders now, this is me making up a a number for the sake of example, but let's say they have 10 million pre-orders now, um and they expected 30 million, so that could mean a number of things. It could mean that their their expectations were way too low, and they're actually going to sell 100 million on day one, or it could mean that that 10 million is just part of that 30 million that they had forecast, and that like, um the the the demand was just kind of like ahead of time because there's so much demand that people just uh a lot more people pre-ordered that than expected, and they would have bought the game on day one anyway, which I thought was interesting, and I thought that was actually a kind of a good reason for not sharing the raw numbers. I suppose he doesn't want to um send investors into a frothy hype before uh the numbers are actually revealed because then if their expectations are too high, then remember what I said earlier about like Wall Street being all about expectations versus results, if their expectations are too high for your launch day, um then even uh

a crazy number of sales, if it doesn't hit those expectations, could be bad news for Take-Two stock. And Take-Two pricing right now, if you look at the stock price, right now it it has baked into it a certain number of sales. There's a certain threshold, a certain bar that investors are expecting GTA 6 to hit. The question is whether it will surpass that bar, meet that bar, or be lower than that bar. That's the big question that everybody is asking, and that what everybody's going to look at when November 19th comes around, and more importantly from an investor investor point of view and a sales point of view, um if and when they reveal the sales figures, what those numbers actually look like. So, it makes sense that they're not sharing pre-order data. The other thing I asked him about was hardware shortages because we've seen Xbox's Matthew Ball, their chief strategist, come out and say, "Hey, we are not able to make enough Xboxes to compete with demand because of this AI chip crisis that is stealing all the all the chips that everybody needs to make consoles." That is the main reason that

we've seen Xbox and PlayStation and Switch all go up in price this year. And Xbox has said that I don't believe PlayStation has said that they're running into a shortage, but we've seen anecdotal evidence that that might be the case. So, I asked Strauss Zelnick, he said he's actually a little skeptical that that's the case. He was talking about how the the price points going up is is not does not thrill him, but he doesn't think there's going to be a supply shortage. Although, of course, he says that wouldn't thrill him. But, he also says that their expectations are based on the the install base that they're expecting around launch time, the console install base they're expecting around launch time, which is not going to be smaller than Take-Two expected, according to him. One other topic I talked about with Strauss, I asked him a few questions, most of them he didn't answer. I asked him some kind of uh things I didn't exactly expect to get straight answers out of him on, such as "Hey, are you interested in buying anything from EA now that it seems now that EA has gone private and might be

might be going on a fire sale to cut costs because of course if you don't know, EA was taken private by Saudi Arabia and some other investors in this $55 billion deal that closed this week. And EA has said, according to my colleagues at Bloomberg a few months ago, EA has told debt investors that it plans to cut $700 million per year out of its costs, which will likely mean could could mean a number of things. There could be a number of ways for that to happen. Will almost certainly mean big big layoffs. And the question I asked Strauss was, are you interested in potentially buying any of EA's studios or IPs? Have you had any conversations with them? And of course he said no, he's not going to talk about that sort of thing. Asked him a few other things he wouldn't talk about. But one thing he he did talk about a little bit is um the other kind of big beat for GTA that is coming in the near future, which is the announcement that Grand Theft Auto 6 is next trailer, the big quote-unquote extended look, which will likely be um kind of a meaty look at the game's

actual gameplay. That is going to arrive on August 27th and it is going to be a Netflix-timed exclusive, which is very funny to me. The idea that this marketing would be like a Netflix exclusive of all things. So the way it's going to work is that on August 27th at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, I believe, uh Netflix is going to run this trailer, this extended look at the game, and it's only going to be available on Netflix for 6 hours, after which it will be on the rest of the internet. So it'll go on YouTube and wherever else, I'm sure all the all the different gaming blogs and whatnot, all the game sites. Um but for 6 hours it'll be exclusive to Netflix, which I thought was really interesting. A lot of people have been looking at that and kind of wondering what the deal is with that. More, I mean, you could use the word unprecedented to describe a lot of Grand Theft Auto and it'll be really interesting to just look at how things go in the next few weeks and months and when the game comes out. I'm excited to talk more about it. Um excited to to play it, of course, and talk about thoughts on it. Um maybe I'll share some

thoughts on this YouTube channel. I don't I haven't used this channel so far to talk a lot about the games that I'm playing and what I think of them, but maybe that'll change down the road. You'll certainly hear me talking about it on Triple Click, so make sure you subscribe to the Triple Click podcast to hear that. Anyway, so it's going to be on Netflix August 27th. Why did that happen? How did that happen? Um Zelnick wouldn't answer a lot of questions about this. He wouldn't talk about how the deal came together. He wouldn't talk about financial terms. I asked him, "Did Netflix pay you guys for this? How much did they pay you for this? He said, "We're not We're not disclosing terms." He said, "We're thrilled to be in business with Netflix. We've had numerous partnerships with Netflix. They're great partners." Netflix actually, if you don't know, Netflix has their own games section. That's a a story for another day is Netflix's various attempts to get into games and what has or hasn't worked. But they have a game section. On it, they have the first three Grand Theft Auto games and Red Dead Redemption. You can play all of those on a television with that that supports Netflix games and that allows for it or you could play it on you put Netflix on your computer, you

can play those games. So, they already had a deal with Rockstar, they already had a relationship with Rockstar and Take-Two. Which I think is interesting. I could only speculate as to how this deal came together. I don't want to speculate about who paid who and what that term looks like cuz I really don't know. I do have some thoughts on why this might have happened, but first I want to share a couple more things from Strauss Zelnick, which is I asked him if I said, "Okay, look, is there I know you don't want to talk about the terms, but like is there a benefit to Take-Two and Rockstar to being on Netflix beyond whatever financial terms you guys are getting? Like is there is there an audience you're reaching there that might not otherwise be looking at gameplay of GTA 6?" And he said, "I do think there's a reasoning behind this. I think when the title is launched on Netflix, if you watch it, you'll understand more." And I said, "What does that mean? Like you'll be it'll feel like you're watching a Netflix show?" And he said, "Yes." Which I thought was interesting. He also said "It's going to be a must-see event and Netflix has 200

million subscribers. So, undoubtedly thrilled about the number of people who who could potentially be watching this thing." I think there are a few reasons this makes sense. First and foremost, I mean look, if Netflix is writing a huge check to Take-Two and Rockstar for this, then it's only upside for them. 6 hours is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't really hurt anybody to have a gameplay footage available on Netflix 6 hours in advance. You could I mean this is all marketing, right? It's not like we're talking about a video game being made only available to some subset of players. I think that anyone who complains that it is like consumer unfriendly or hostile or whatever like bad bad practice anti-consumer to have a a piece of marketing footage available on Netflix for 6 hours before it's on YouTube. I think pick your battles, man, if you're if you're complaining about that one. So there's really very little downside to this. And it seems like there's a lot of upside for both of them. For one, it does feel like an

event. It's going to be a whole thing. People are going to be saying, "Well, all right, it's 3:00 p.m. Now time to turn on Netflix." In the same way you might say, "Oh, the Super Bowl's on. Let's all put it on NBC or wherever it is that year." It'll feel like watching a live event. It'll be one of those kind of rare experiences, I think, where all it feels where there's kind of a lot of people talk about the lack of monoculture in the kind of world of entertainment these days and how there isn't really there aren't really big shows or movies that often other than like Odyssey where it feels like everybody's watching them and talking about them and there there's some big cultural conversation around them. I think in this case, having everybody tune into Netflix for this one big event could help create that in a way that would feel a lot more fragmented if it was just released one morning the way that Rockstar typically does it where it was just like, "Oh, here's a trailer. It's on YouTube. It's on X. It's on whatever." I think the fact that it's kind of like a Netflix event makes it feel a little bit more just kind of unifying in terms

of the culture. I don't know. I could be wrong, but I'm very curious to see what the conversations look like that day because it'll feel, at least on social media, I'll be checking my Blue Sky account cuz I'll be very curious to see how people are reacting or Reddit or whatever when they're all just kind of watching the same thing at the same time. I think that'll be really interesting. Um and I do actually think that uh again, whatever potential financial terms they're getting out of this aside, I actually do think that they're able to reach by going through Netflix some people who might not otherwise be online enough to be tuning in to Rockstar's YouTube channels and checking out the new trailer at all hours of the day. I think there are people out there and don't get me wrong. I mean, look, GTA 6 it's broken YouTube records with the trailers. It's already reached massive massive audiences. Everybody knows about it. Everybody knows that it's coming. But I think there is a potential audience of people who like maybe have heard of GTA 6, maybe know that it's coming, but like wouldn't

think to watch gameplay of it and certainly wouldn't think to buy it on the day it comes out who just if they happen to be turning into Netflix that day after work, if they see this thing and they're like, "Oh, that's interesting. I should check this out." They might have visibility into it that they wouldn't have otherwise. The same way that everybody is just killing for the kind of organic viral media that you get if you have an Instagram short that goes viral and pops up into everybody's feed. I think this can have that same sort of effect. And I do think there are people out there who like um again, might know that GTA 6 exists but aren't necessarily buying it on day one. Um wouldn't really haven't really thought about it. Aren't counting down the days the way that a huge subset of people are. Um and I think this can reach those people or or at least just kind of feel like it could lead to a lot of parents calling up their kids and being like, "Hey, have you heard of this Grand Theft Auto thing?" Um for Netflix obviously, usually uh consequential for them to be

the people and and they will certainly see a lot of buzz come out of that. Um I don't think it's necessarily going to lead to some huge surge in subscriptions for them, but it will lead to a a of attention, a lot of engaged viewers, and a lot of eyeballs, and a lot of people talking about Netflix, which is a big win for them. So, to me, this seems like it makes sense all around. One final thing that I'll leave you with cuz I thought this was pretty funny is that when I spoke to Strauss Zelnick at Take-Two this morning, I asked him, "So, what are you going to do on November 19th, the day GTA comes out? Do you have some big plans? Are you going to hold a party? Are you going to just be like relaxing on your couch?" And he said, quote, "It's ultra top secret at the moment, but at some point before then, I'll be happy to talk to you about it." Which just made me wonder, what is Strauss doing that on that day? What is Strauss Zelnick doing that is so top secret that he can't talk about it yet? I guess we will find out soon. I expect

that he is, uh, I don't know, going to be, uh, climbing the Empire State Building with a giant banner that says Grand Theft Auto and planting his flag at the top of the building before helicopters come to spirit him away. All right, that is that. I hope you all have a good weekend, and I will see you next time.