According to analysts at investment bank Piper Sandler, Grand Theft Auto VI could sell around 46 million copies on its launch day.
For comparison, Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, sold approximately 11.2 million copies on its first day. Thus, GTA VI could surpass its predecessor's performance by more than four times.
What's unusual is how Piper Sandler arrived at its conclusions. In addition to analyzing the launches of major AAA projects in recent years, including Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, analysts used statistics on the popularity of the r/GTA6 community on Reddit.
According to the study, by the release date of November 19, the number of weekly visitors to the GTA VI subreddit could grow to approximately 1.3 million people. By applying coefficients based on the dynamics of past game launches to this indicator, specialists arrived at a forecast of around 46 million copies sold.
Interestingly, a similar result was obtained when using the current audience of the community — about 870 thousand visitors per week. In this case, analysts used a different historical coefficient, which also led to an estimate of 46 million sales.
Piper Sandler considers its assumptions to be quite conservative. According to the bank, the growth in activity of the GTA VI community by the time of release could be even higher than predicted, if one considers the indicators of previous major game launches.