It's no secret that the GTA 6 launch might end up standing as one of the biggest game releases of all time – but just how big will it be?
Well, investment bank Piper Sandler (via Wccftech) believes Rockstar Games will manage around 46 million sales on day one. That's a massive number in any context, but it's especially big for a new release – even if that release is of the AAA variety. So, how did Piper Sandler come up with such a high figure?
Well, it used the power of past big title launches, including some from Rockstar itself… and, erm, Reddit.
Put simply, it estimates the number of weekly visitors to the GTA 6 subreddit at release, and then take its current weekly visitors – about five months now before the long-awaited November 19 launch. They then apply historical multipliers from other game drops to transform this traffic on Reddit into a sales figure.
It's… a lot, but it makes sense if you break it all down into smaller numbers for digestion. For example, as Piper Sandler assumes that r/GTA6 will hit about 1.3 million weekly visitors when Rockstar's new game launches and applies a 35x multiplier, this leads to an estimate of about 46 million sales or so.
Alternatively, when the bank uses the subreddit's 870,000 weekly visitors – the current number – and a 53x median multiplier, it reaches that same 46 million figure. And, no, Piper Sandler doesn't think its assumptions are too extreme. The subreddit growth it assumes for the GTA 6 launch would, in fact, be conservative if compared to past average visitor count hikes.
Piper Sandler isn't only using Reddit for its estimates, either. Its report includes a table that analyzes 18 other AAA games from the last eight years, like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
It's hard to imagine GTA 6 beating out so many genre giants… even its own predecessors. Heck, GTA 5 only managed 11.21 million copies on its launch day some 13 years ago – but the hype has undeniably grown over time.
If Piper Sandler's estimates ring true and GTA 6 boasts 46 million sales at launch, as Wccftech notes, that means it might net over $3 billion on release. That's quite the revenue. Previously, analysts predicted that GTA 6 will double GTA 5 and make $3.2 billion in its first year – not its first day.
Only time will tell how the game truly performs, but I'd argue that it'll stand as an impressive launch regardless of which prediction turns out to be on par with reality – this is GTA 6 we're talking about here, after all.
