Take-Two held its Q1 FY2027 earnings call on the morning of August 7, breaking from its usual post-market timing in a pre-market Friday slot that drew attention even before the call started. CEO Strauss Zelnick addressed GTA 6 pre-orders directly, calling the level of demand unprecedented and astonishing and telling investors the numbers had vastly exceeded the company's own internal forecasts. Pre-orders opened June 25, five days before the quarter ended June 30, so only that opening window was in scope.
Zelnick did not give a specific pre-order figure, and he was blunt about why the company was not moving its numbers on the back of one. "To be clear, we haven't sold one unit yet. You can cancel a pre-order," he said. "We just don't believe in claiming victory before it occurs." He also said the demand is so far outside anything the company has seen that it cannot model it, telling analysts the pre-orders are unprecedented enough that Take-Two does not know how they will translate into sales.
The financials underneath that were solid rather than spectacular, which is what you would expect from a quarter that caught only the opening days of pre-orders. Q1 net bookings came in at $1.39 billion, above the $1.32 billion to $1.37 billion Take-Two had guided to, though down roughly 3 percent from the same quarter last year. The full-year FY2027 outlook stayed exactly where it was, $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion, around 20 percent growth at the midpoint. Take-Two reiterated rather than raised it, and Zelnick tied the range directly to the launch: "With these positive trends and excitement around the November 19th launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, we are reiterating our Fiscal 2027 Net Bookings outlook." No change to the date.
The call came the day after Rockstar announced the August 27 Netflix premiere of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, the first new footage confirmed since Trailer 2 in May 2025. Zelnick also took the two questions that have followed GTA 6 since pre-orders opened. On the missing disc: "Discs, and note I said discs, don't really make sense for the consumer," adding that "our business is well over 90% digitally distributed, as it is." Physical copies do exist, but the box contains a download code rather than a disc. On price, with the standard edition at $79.99 and the Ultimate Edition at $99.99, he said "I think Rockstar got it right on the pricing of the Standard Edition and Ultimate Edition," and that pre-orders had been exceptional on both versions.
The main read from this week is that Take-Two's public confidence in November 19 is as firm as it has ever been, and that the actual pre-order count is a number the market still has to work out for itself.