XBOX have revealed that the pre-orders for GTA 6 have been smashing many previous statistics for the company. This information was revealed as part of a fallout over a recent article.
It was reported by The Verge’s Tom Warren that pre-orders across the board for Rockstar’s new game is “heavily skewed toward PS5”. That’s according to sources within XBOX. This has apparently led to some serious worry inside of the Seattle based console manufacturer. This shouldn’t come too much as a surprise considering the market share for XBOX is far less than PlayStation and hardware prices have gone up significantly.
In response to this reporting, XBOX Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball hit back at the negativity. In a Tweet the CSO said:
“We are very happy with GTA VI pre-orders. The title is breaking records for XBOX, we expect even more records will be broken throughout the fall, and our internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market.”
The last bit is the key part. Of course far more people are pre-ordering the game on PlayStation because PS5 has a significantly larger install base. Relative to market share sales is nothing to really write home about. Yes, some people are buying consoles, there are some buying XBOXs in particular, but due to the exceptionally high cost it isn’t shifting the needle much. Ground has not been made on PlayStation.
Some of this performance can be attributed to the close marketing deal Rockstar have with Sony. We’ve seen how Rockstar are promoting Grand Theft Auto VI with a “Plays Best on PlayStation” banner. There’s limited edition GTA VI controllers strictly for PS5. Merch. Adverts only would show the PS5 version of the game when attempting to click through and pre-order. I’ve even seen a couple of people ask if it’s exclusive to PlayStation. Rockstar have handed Sony a significant advantage here. Whilst most of the gaming community is upset at Sony for a myriad of reasons, It hasn’t had any meaningful impact on the ability to make money with Grand Theft Auto 6.
Both PlayStation and XBOX need GTA to be extremely successful for them to end stagnated console sales. It might not be enough though. The higher barrier to entry is simply too much for some. We’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out later in November. As someone who uses XBOX and has friends frustrated with the complacent PlayStation, we need Microsoft to be competitive so to better all consumers.
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