It's nearly here. After 13 years since the last title, multiple delays and leaks, the GTA 6 pre-order listing finally came out, and it's on track to break records.

Nearly a month after the pre-orders were released on June 25th, Ronan Patrick of Newzoo released a report that affirmed the same.

"Newzoo's data shows that GTA 6 generated roughly $180 million in digital pre-order sales across the US and the five largest European markets in its first week. These markets are the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Based on the pre-order sales curve GTA 6 is most likely to follow, this puts the game on pace for $3.3 billion to $5.2 billion in cumulative global sales by the end of launch week. That marks the strongest opening to a pre-order campaign ever recorded in our dataset."

The number is a huge jump. When GTA 5 launched back in 2013, it made a little over a billion dollars within the first week. More importantly, what makes this number even more incredible are the platforms the game is available on so far. At the moment, it's only available on Xbox Series S and X as well as the PlayStation 5. PC pre-orders aren't open.

And there's good reason behind the hype. Ever since the first trailer dropped back in 2023, there has been tremendous anticipation behind Rockstar's new game. The last major sequel they released that wasn't a remake was Red Dead Redemption 2, and the game remains a benchmark of what an open-world game should be.

Moreover, compared to titles like Cyberpunk 2077, which had immense hype before release, GTA 6 is what Newzoo terms a 'The Proven Sequel'. It's a tested franchise whose studio hasn't failed fans before.

The sales number is one that might just be waiting to be broken. In any case, there's one factor limiting them, and a former dev has explained the factor behind it.

Why Rockstar isn't releasing on PC at launch

Veteran GTA 5 producer John Ricchio, who worked at Rockstar till 2014, told Kiwi Talks the reasons are technical, per WCCF Tech.

It all comes down to how they scale the game for PC from console, and that's what Ricchio emphasized.

"Going shrinking is a lot harder than extending," the GTA 5 producer said. "It’s way harder to make your game performant than it is to just be like, 'Oh we’ve got extra room, cool, we can turn up the shadow resolution, we can render things further out.' But when you have to render things closer, that means you have to write code to actively stop rendering things earlier, or you have to decimate meshes… It’s a lot of manual work."

He also added, "Most of the time it's just… is it worth spending time getting a PC port going versus working on GTA V? It's never any specific anti-platform [stance], it's just is it worth spending the time and effort… At the end of the day, they look at the numbers and go, 'We need these 50 engineers to go make GTA V amazing, or we can have them spend six months making a PC port of RDR1.' And GTA V wins every single time."

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Written by

Siddharth Shirwadkar