Sensor Tower said 89% of Grand Theft Auto preorders are going to the $100 ultimate edition, a split that is far more lopsided than the $80 standard edition and far outside the usual pattern for game launches.
That is why buyers of GTA6 are being watched so closely today. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has already said preorders are "skewing more to the premium edition," and he called demand "unprecedented and astonishing" in a separate interview, while also saying nobody yet knows how the numbers will translate into sales.
Karl Kontus said the premium share is extraordinary because games usually see only 10% to 20% of buyers choose the higher-priced edition. He said he has never seen a 90% premium share before, even though Sensor Tower put the Xbox split at 90% and the PlayStation split at 88.5%. The gap is big enough that the current mix is not just strong demand, but an unusually concentrated bet on the more expensive version before launch.
Kontus said the $100 SKU carries a lot of extra content, including vehicle customisation shops, more vehicles, weapons and a custom mod shop. He also argued the jump from $80 to $100 is not as steep as it looks when set against the industry-standard $70 price point, and said for a lot of people this is the one must-buy game of the year, so they want to make the most of it. In other words, the premium edition is not selling only because it is premium; it is selling because the added content makes the higher price easier to justify for the most committed buyers.
Still, Kontus said the mix may not stay this skewed. He expects most preorders to arrive in the last week or so before launch, once the wider marketing campaign has fully kicked in and more casual buyers start moving. On that view, the split could drift much closer to 50/50 by the time the game reaches the market, even though today it is overwhelmingly tilted toward the higher-priced edition.
That uncertainty is part of the story. Kontus said 4 million preorders would imply 40 million-plus preorders by launch if normal preorder trajectories applied, but he also said GTA6 is hard to forecast and has no real benchmark. He even said he was surprised there was no $150 SKU, a comment that captures both how unusual the demand is and how much room there may still be for the final preorder count to change before release.
Special editions tend to do well early because the first wave of buyers is usually the most committed. But even by that standard, GTA6 stands out. The question now is not whether the premium edition is winning the preorder race; it is how much of that lead survives once the broader audience starts buying, and whether the final split still looks anything like the one Sensor Tower is seeing today.
