A Bank Thinks GTA 6 Sells 50 Million Copies. Take-Two's Own Math Looks Smaller

Fifty million copies is the number people are passing around. It is not a sales figure. Nobody has bought Grand Theft Auto VI yet. It is what Wells Fargo thinks the game does once it is actually on shelves, and it sits well above the number the same bank thinks it can see inside Take-Two’s own forecast.

The note, which started circulating at the start of the week and was still being chewed over on Wednesday, puts GTA 6 at about 50 million units with a gross average price of $90. The bank reads Take-Two’s current guidance as something closer to 33 million units at $80. Do the multiplication yourself. Fifty million at $90 is $4.5 billion. Thirty-three million at $80 is $2.64 billion. The gap is about $1.9 billion in gross sales, and both sides of it are a model, not a receipt.

The $90 is not the price on the box. Rockstar’s pre-order sits at $79.99, with preload on November 12 and launch on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. A gross average above the sticker means the bank is counting editions that cost more than the base game. Take-Two has not published a unit target. The 33 million is Wells Fargo working backward from guidance, the same way the 50 million is Wells Fargo working forward from hope and history.

The rest of the note is less fun. The bank trimmed the near-term numbers, basketball units and the mobile business, and kept an Overweight rating with a $300 target anyway. Take-Two shares still fell about 4% on Tuesday. That is the shape of this stock until November: the quarters in front of the game can disappoint, and the model only works if the game is as large as the people building the model need it to be.

GTA 5 sold on a scale that made 30 million sound ordinary and 50 million sound like a dare. Five weeks out, the dare is still just a cell in a spreadsheet. The only number Rockstar has actually committed to is the date.