Take-Two says GTA 6 pre-orders are way past expectations, NBA 2K27 came in under forecast

Take-Two has been talking numbers and the headline is the one we all saw coming. According to VGC, the company says GTA 6 pre-orders are tracking far above what it initially expected. Meanwhile NBA 2K27 landed below its own forecast, which is a weird sentence to read next to the GTA 6 news.

Worth keeping some perspective on the NBA bit though. Even with the miss, it was still the second biggest launch in the series' history. So "below forecast" here means it didn't hit whatever wild internal number they'd penciled in, not that it flopped. Still, you have to wonder how much of the shortfall is people saving their cash for a certain game dropping November 19.

the pre-order thing keeps coming up

This is the second or third time Take-Two has publicly said pre-orders are blowing past expectations. At some point you stop calling it a surprise and start calling it the plan. Two trailers, an extended look back in August, a full merch takeover in London, a festival in Miami. None of that is cheap and none of it happens if the bean counters aren't confident.

What I actually want to know is what "far above initial expectations" translates to in raw units. Nobody's putting a number on it. Take-Two never does. But if the pre-order bonus Vintage Vice City Pack is doing the heavy lifting, or if it's just pure Leonida hype, the launch window projections are going to keep climbing.

NBA was still the second most successful launch in the series' history, it says

That quote is doing a lot of work for 2K. Fair play to them for getting it out there before the earnings call gets picked apart.

what it means for launch week

Nothing concrete, honestly. Pre-orders being huge doesn't tell us anything about how the game runs on base PS5, or whether the servers hold up, or whether the day one patch is 90GB. It just tells us a lot of people are already in. Ten days out, that tracks.

Anyone else think Take-Two keeps saying this out loud because they're trying to soften the blow of the NBA number, or is it genuinely just them being excited?

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Source: VGC · Curated content.