Xbox wants you to know it’s “very happy” with how Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are going on its consoles. What it didn’t do is deny the report that set off the conversation.
That report claims GTA 6 pre-orders are far higher on PlayStation 5 than on Xbox Series X/S. Xbox answered with an official public statement. Read it closely and you’ll see it praises the numbers without disputing the gap.
The tweet that got a reply
On September 24, Tom Warren at The Verge published a newsletter titled ‘The Xbox reset gets ugly.’ Most of it covered Xbox’s latest layoffs across its first-party studios and what they mean for the brand. Warren wasn’t optimistic about the near future either. He said GTA 6 pre-orders are reportedly “heavily skewed” towards PlayStation5 right now.
Warren posted the piece on Twitter. That’s where Matthew Ball, Xbox’s chief strategy officer, answered him directly.
Ball said Xbox is “very happy with GTA VI pre-orders.” He said the game is “breaking records” for the platform and that the company expects “even more records” to fall through the fall. He finished by saying that, according to Xbox’s internal analysis, GTA 6 pre-orders are “matching [Xbox’s] share of the console market.”
So that’s an official Xbox statement answering an unconfirmed report. Keep those two things separate, because they don’t contradict each other as much as it first looks.
The math Ball left out
“Matching our share of the market” sounds reassuring. Ball just didn’t say what that share is.
The public numbers aren’t flattering. As of last November, the PlayStation 5 had sold 84.2 million units. The Xbox Series X and S had sold a combined total of just over 34 million.
If console sales have kept following that path, Xbox’s share of the market would be much smaller than PlayStation’s by default. In that case, pre-orders that “match” Xbox’s share would still sit well behind PS5, and The Verge’s report of far more PS5 pre-orders would likely hold up. Ball’s statement and the report can both be true at once. (That’s corporate phrasing working exactly as intended.)
Sony has the marketing lane
Market share is only part of it. Sony has also led GTA 6’s early marketing push through an exclusive marketing deal, and GTA 6 has already taken over the PlayStation Store and app.
Sony is also putting out a set of limited-edition Grand Theft Auto 6 DualSense controllers, scheduled to ship alongside the game on November 19.
A rough week for Xbox
The pre-order back-and-forth arrived at the end of a bad stretch. On September 22, Xbox announced its second wave of major 2026 layoffs and confirmed that 268 employees across its first-party studios would lose their jobs.
This round reportedly hit Halo Studios and World’s Edge especially hard. Halo and Age of Empires have both been moved under Activision.
That was only one of several stories last week that made Xbox look bad. A pre-order report didn’t need much help to turn into a referendum on the whole brand.
Ball’s answer, taken at its word, amounts to this: Xbox is hitting records on a playing field it already knows is smaller. And come November 19, Sony will have its own GTA 6 controllers on shelves next to the game.
