EA founder says 75 million copies would be mind-blowing for GTA 6, and Thanksgiving football is the real test

Saw this interview clip with Bing Gordon floating around. He's the EA founder, and he was on some Yahoo Finance show talking about what success looks like for GTA 6. The number he threw out was 75 million copies sold. Said that would be "mind-blowing."

Apparently he got that from thinking a trailer hit 750 million views and then taking 10% of that. Which is a weird way to do math but whatever. No single GTA 6 video has 750 million views, but if you add up everything across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, it's probably way past that by now. So the logic isn't totally insane.

The part that got me was the Thanksgiving thing. He said success for GTA 6 is if after eating turkey you don't watch football, you play GTA. That's a real quote. Launch is November 19th, Thanksgiving is the 26th. So basically a week after launch, the game has to be good enough to pull people away from NFL games. That's a high bar for a lot of people.

"I think from my point of view, what success for GTA 6 is going to be on Thanksgiving Day after eating your turkey, you don't watch football, you play GTA."

Of course it's not either/or. People will have the game on one screen and football on another. But I get what he's saying. A game that dominates that holiday weekend would be a cultural moment.

He also talked about movie comparisons. A film doing $300 million is great, $1 billion is obscene. Games can hit those numbers but they're not directly comparable because of pricing and development costs. Fair enough.

Sensor Tower is claiming 7 million copies sold already, around $700 million revenue. They project 25 million preorders by launch, which would be about $2 billion. Circana data says almost 1 in 3 console and PC gamers in the US plan to buy it. Those numbers are wild for a game that's still over three weeks out.

Does 75 million seem like a lowball to you, or is that actually a realistic target given how long it's been since GTA 5?

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Source: GameSpot · Curated content.