332. The Pre-Order
Grand Theft Auto VI has not been released. It is scheduled for release in November 2026. No one has played it. No one has bought it. No one owns it. The game consists, currently, of an announced release date, a title, and a series of promotional videos. The game itself does not exist as a product anyone can take home.
According to reports this week, Grand Theft Auto VI has accumulated more than three billion dollars in pre-orders and nearly forty million copies claimed in advance.
(I want to stay with this. Three billion dollars. This is not revenue from a product. This is revenue from the promise of a product. Forty million people have given Rockstar Games money in exchange for a game that is not available to them, a game they cannot play, a game that is, at the moment of this writing, a date on a calendar and some trailers. The money is real. The trailers are real. The game is scheduled.)
Grand Theft Auto VI will, when released, be the largest entertainment launch in recorded history. This is largely because of the money that has already been collected for it. The money was collected before the product existed. The product's existence, in November, will confirm that the money was a good idea.
(Pre-orders, as a mechanism, operate on the following logic: if you pay for a thing before you can have the thing, you are guaranteed the thing when the thing becomes available. This is also the logic of most other financial transactions. The unusual element here is that the total sum is three billion dollars and the thing in question is a video game. The standard pre-order model was designed for concerts, sporting events, and restaurant tables. The gaming industry has borrowed it, scaled it by a factor of approximately one billion, and applied it to a story about crime in a fictional version of Miami.)
The money arrived in November of last year, and in January, and in April, and this week. The game will arrive in November of this year. These two events are in the correct order according to the people who accepted the money.
Forty million people are waiting. The money is already somewhere.