Rockstar apologises for the GTA VI gameplay leaks, confirms Thursday's extended look, and keeps the November 19 release date unchanged.

Grand Theft Auto VI comes out on 19th November 2026. It has already sold an estimated 10.31 million copies and brought in just over $1 billion, or about KES 130 billion. Those figures are on Sensor Tower’s live GTA VI tracker, which has followed pre-orders on PlayStation and Xbox since they opened on 25th June.

Sensor Tower is a market data firm, and these are its estimates.

GTA V, the last game in the series, came out in 2013 and took three days on sale to reach $1 billion. Take-Two, the company behind the series, believed that was the fastest any entertainment release had got there. GTA VI’s estimate has passed the same mark before the game is out.

The two numbers aren’t measured the same way. The GTA V figure was Take-Two’s own estimate of sales in shops, at 2013 prices. The GTA VI figure is an outside estimate of pre-orders on two consoles. Still, the nearest pre-order number a publisher has confirmed is Cyberpunk 2077’s 8 million in 2020, and that one counted PC buyers as well.

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Where the money came from

Three of every four copies were bought on PlayStation. Sensor Tower counts 7.73 million pre-orders on PlayStation 5, worth $751 million or about KES 98 billion. Xbox Series X and Series S have 2.58 million, worth $250 million or about KES 32.5 billion. There is no PC version to pre-order.

A lot of it also came late. About 2.2 million copies were sold on the first day, worth $216 million or about KES 28 billion. Sales then slowed down, and the count was 4 million at the end of July. Things picked up in late August, when Rockstar’s extended look at the game aired on Netflix, and Sensor Tower credits that special for the jump. The count went from 4.41 million on 26th August to 4.73 million four days later. By 25th October it was 6.92 million. Then 3.39 million more copies were sold in the 15 days to 9th November, which is a third of all the pre-orders so far. On 9th November alone, the estimate grew by 620,000 copies and about $59.5 million, or KES 7.7 billion.

The game sells in two versions. The Standard Edition is $79.99 on the US PlayStation Store, or about KES 10,400, and the Ultimate Edition is $99.99, or about KES 13,000. Divide Sensor Tower’s revenue by its copies and you get about $97 a copy, or KES 12,600. Prices differ from country to country, but we think that points to most buyers paying for the Ultimate Edition. Sensor Tower said as much in August, when it put the Ultimate Edition at about 89% of pre-orders. The $97 is also close to the shelf price, so we think the $1 billion is what buyers paid, before Sony and Microsoft take their share of each sale in their stores.

What Take-Two has said

Take-Two Interactive owns Rockstar Games, the studio that makes Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two reported its quarterly results on 9th November and gave no pre-order number. Its chief executive, Strauss Zelnick, said only that pre-orders were “continuing to reach unprecedented levels”.

On the call with investors that followed, an analyst asked why the company hadn’t raised its forecast if pre-orders were that strong. Zelnick’s answer was that Take-Two avoids claiming success before it happens, and that it would say more once the game has been on sale.

So the forecast stayed where it was. Take-Two expects net bookings, its measure of what it sells in a period, of $8 billion to $8.2 billion for the year to 31st March 2027. That is roughly KES 1.04 trillion to KES 1.07 trillion. For October to December, the quarter GTA VI launches in, it expects $3.35 billion to $3.5 billion, or about KES 435 billion to KES 455 billion. That is about twice the $1.76 billion, or KES 229 billion, it booked in the same quarter last year. Take-Two told investors the forecast assumes strong sales of the Ultimate Edition.

What the estimate leaves out

Sensor Tower hasn’t published how it arrives at these numbers. A note on the tracker says the model was updated on 5th October to better reflect how sales split between countries, with what it calls a small impact on copies, revenue and the console mix. The tracker also doesn’t say whether it counts boxed copies. GTA VI has no disc, and the box you buy in a shop holds a download code.

So treat the $1 billion as an estimate. The first official figure will come from Take-Two after 19th November. If Sensor Tower is even close, though, GTA VI will have matched before launch what GTA V needed its first three days to do, and a third of that money arrived in just over two weeks.

Buying it from Kenya

Pre-loading opened on 10th November for anyone who has pre-ordered, so the game can be downloaded now and played from the 19th.

PlayStation’s country selector still doesn’t list Kenya. PS5 owners here buy digital games through accounts registered in other countries, as we explained in August when Rockstar apologised for the GTA VI leaks. With no disc, even a boxed copy is a code that has to be redeemed through an account like that.