Xbox has gone on record to say it is “very happy” with how Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are doing on its hardware. The report that started the whole discussion, though, went undenied.
According to that report, far more people have pre-ordered GTA 6 on PlayStation 5 than on Xbox Series X/S. Xbox answered with an official public statement. A careful read shows it compliments the numbers but never actually challenges the gap.
The tweet Xbox answered
The Verge’s Tom Warren sent out a newsletter on September 24 called ‘The Xbox reset gets ugly.’ Most of it dealt with Xbox’s newest round of layoffs at its first-party studios and what they could mean for the brand. Warren didn’t sound hopeful about the months ahead, either. He wrote that GTA 6 pre-orders are reportedly “heavily skewed” towards PlayStation5 at the moment.
When Warren shared the newsletter on Twitter, Matthew Ball, Xbox's chief strategy officer, answered him there.
According to Ball, Xbox is “very happy with GTA VI pre-orders.” He added that the game is “breaking records” on the platform and that the company expects “even more records” to fall through the fall. He ended by saying Xbox’s internal analysis shows GTA 6 pre-orders “matching [Xbox’s] share of the console market.”
That makes this an official Xbox statement responding to an unconfirmed report. It’s worth keeping the two apart, since they clash less than they seem to at first.
What Ball didn’t spell out
“Matching our share of the market” has a comforting ring to it. What Ball didn’t mention is how big that share actually is.
The publicly known figures don’t help Xbox. Last November, the PlayStation 5 stood at 84.2 million units sold, while the Xbox Series X and S together had sold slightly more than 34 million.
If console sales have stayed on that trajectory, Xbox’s slice of the market would naturally be far smaller than PlayStation’s. Pre-orders that “match” that slice would then still trail PS5 by a wide margin, and The Verge’s claim of many more PS5 pre-orders would probably stand. Ball’s comments and the report can both be accurate. (Corporate wording doing exactly what it was designed to do.)
Sony owns the marketing
Market share is only one piece of the picture. Through an exclusive marketing agreement, Sony has also been at the front of GTA 6’s early promotion, and the game already dominates the PlayStation Store and app.
On top of that, Sony is releasing a line of limited-edition Grand Theft Auto 6 DualSense controllers, due to ship with the game on November 19.
A difficult week for Xbox
The pre-order dispute landed at the tail end of a rough few days. On September 22, Xbox announced its second big wave of layoffs in 2026, confirming that 268 staff across its first-party studios would be let go.
Halo Studios and World’s Edge were reportedly among the hardest hit. Both Halo and Age of Empires now sit under Activision.
The layoffs were just one of several stories last week that painted Xbox in a poor light. Against that backdrop, a single pre-order report quickly became a verdict on the brand as a whole.
Taken at face value, Ball’s reply boils down to this: Xbox is setting records in a market it already knows is the smaller one. And on November 19, Sony’s own GTA 6 controllers will be sitting on store shelves right beside the game.