Xbox's Matthew Ball says GTA 6 pre-orders match its console share, after a report of a PS5 skew

Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball said on September 24 that Xbox is "very happy" with GTA 6 pre-orders, responding to a report that they lean heavily towards PS5. He gave no figures, and Rockstar has not published pre-order numbers for either platform.

The report came from The Verge, which is behind a paywall. As Push Square quoted it, the piece by Tom Warren said "sources at Xbox" had told him pre-orders were "heavily skewed toward PS5". Those sources were not named, and Push Square said it would like to know how big the skew was, so the article it read did not appear to give a size.

Ball replied in a post addressed to Warren. He said the game "is breaking records for XBOX" and that Xbox expects "even more records will be broken throughout the fall". He also said Xbox's "internal analysis shows our share of pre-orders to be matching our share of the console market."

That last claim is Xbox's own analysis, and nobody outside the company has seen the data behind it. It also does not obviously contradict the original report. Push Square put PS5 sales at close to 100 million against an estimated 35 million or so for Xbox Series X|S, and said that alone would point to roughly three PS5 pre-orders for every Xbox one. Push Square added that only Rockstar, Sony and Microsoft know the real split, and wondered whether any proof would ever be shared.

GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19. Rockstar has not said anything about how pre-orders are splitting between the two.

Since then, on November 10, Microsoft said GTA 6 had become the most pre-ordered title ever on the Microsoft Store, and Sony made the same claim for the PlayStation Store. Neither gave a count.