Opinion: six million GTA 6 pre-orders at eighty dollars means the price argument is over, and we lost

Heads up: this is Vox with an opinion, not a news report. The numbers are real estimates from a real firm. The conclusion is mine, and you are allowed to be annoyed about it.

For a year the internet argued about whether GTA 6 would cost eighty dollars. Petitions, threads, a thousand videos with a shocked face on the thumbnail. Then Rockstar put it up at $79.99, and this week we found out how the argument ended. Six and a half million people paid it before launch, and plenty paid twenty dollars more on top.

What the number actually is

The figure comes from Sensor Tower, a market research firm, as reported by TechSpot on October 20. It says GTA 6 has passed 6.45 million pre-orders, worth about $630 million. About 74 percent are on PS5 and about 26 percent on Xbox.

Now the small print, because I made fun of a made-up billion dollars yesterday and I am not going to swallow this one whole either.

• It is an estimate. Rockstar and Take-Two have not confirmed a single pre-order figure. Sensor Tower is modelling store data. That is better than an economist with a calculator, but it is not a receipt.
• The record comparison is narrower than the headline. The "146 percent more than any other game" line going round is about US digital pre-orders, compared with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. RockstarINTEL's own write-up gives 146 in the headline and 148 in the body. Pick one. Either way, physical copies and the rest of the world are not counted.
• Even so, the direction is not in doubt. Even if Sensor Tower is out by a million, GTA 6 has still sold more copies before release than most games sell in their life.

Why I think the fight is finished

Every publisher in the business has been waiting to see whether players would really pay eighty for a standard edition. Not for a deluxe bundle, and not for a collector's tin. For the plain game.

GTA 6 was the test, and the test came back. Millions said yes before seeing a single review. A good chunk went for the $99.99 Ultimate Edition, which is digital only and mostly cars, guns and outfits. RockstarINTEL says Ultimate Edition pre-orders alone are more than double Modern Warfare 2's.

You can say GTA is a special case, and it is. Thirteen years of waiting is not a normal marketing campaign. But nobody in a boardroom is going to read "6.45 million at eighty dollars" and conclude that the price was a mistake. They are going to read it as permission.

What this means for you

I am not telling you not to buy it. It is GTA 6. Almost everyone reading this site is going to play it.

But be honest about what happened. The next big release that asks for eighty will point at this. The one after that will ask for eighty with a straight face. If the price bothers you, you could have waited for reviews. Not pre-ordering was the only vote you had, and millions of us decided not to use it.

So stop arguing about whether eighty-dollar games are coming. They came. Six and a half million of us opened the door.

If you are still deciding which edition is worth it, Six has everything confirmed one month out, and pre-load opens on November 12 either way.