“The fear of Grand Theft Auto VI is overblown.”
When Mat Piscatella, Circana’s director of video games, dropped that line in a conversation with me, I had to stop myself from literally dropping my jaw. The statement itself didn’t come as a shock so much as the fact that someone had finally said it in so many words.
The sentiment sounds like it should be a given. No game in the history of the medium has ever been universally loved, nor universally played. But the industry seems convinced that, if any single game ever is, it’ll be Grand Theft Auto VI. Almost every publisher has either retreated to the September-October release window or to moved forward to 2027, with Nintendo and its Ocarina of Time remake as a notable exception.
No one wants their game to come out at the same time as Grand Theft Auto VI, right? The trouble, Piscatella said, is that some gamers who don’t want to play GTA will be underserved in a crucial pre-holiday period.
I caught up with Piscatella for our quarterly check-in after Circana put out its September report. Below is an edited transcript of our interview:
GamesBeat: How are things?
Mat Piscatella: At the moment, spending is holding up fairly well, as one would have expected going into this November. Hardware spending is okay. Units are a little bit iffier because of the pricing changes year-on-year, but overall spend’s doing okay. It’s holding on. It’ll do okay through Ocarina and GTA, maybe better than okay. Then we’ll see what happens in December and January.
I don’t think anyone has a great read on what everything looks like after these two big games come out, especially for the console market. We’re just gonna have to wait and see together.
GamesBeat: Since you bring it up, there are a handful of games coming out in November, besides GTA and Ocarina. There aren’t very many games coming out in the period after GTA until the beginning of December when Rayman: Legends Retold comes out. Is that just because there’s the presumption that there’s not going to be enough time, space or money left in November after GTA comes out?
Piscatella: It might be. The fear of many teams to put their game in the same window as GTA is completely overblown. GTA is going to be a massive game. Of course it is. It’s going to be a huge cultural event, but not every one of the 49 million people who own a PS5 or an Xbox Series in the U.S. is going to be interested in that.
They’re are a whole bunch of people who are going to want to play other things. There’s a whole Switch market that’s going to want to play other things because they won’t be able to play Grand Theft Auto. So if you’re launching, I don’t know, any kind of cozy game or life sim or first-person shooter. Just because Grand Theft Auto is there doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential market to address.
Not every one of the 49 million people who own a PS5 or an Xbox Series in the U.S. is going to be interested in [Grand Theft Auto VI].
Everyone’s just scared. I guess I get it, but I just think it’s completely overblown. But hey, it’s given GTA a completely wide-open window because everyone else moved. We’ll see what happens. I think this more fear than anything else. We haven’t seen a game this big in… literally 13 years!
GamesBeat: Since GTA V!
Piscatella: I don’t know. There’s a lot of rational thought process behind it. There are reasons for it. But ultimately, a lot of these moves and shifting away just seems more irrational than rational, but that’s just me. A lot of people think that’s wrong.
GamesBeat: There’s definitely a case to be made that we shouldn’t be so scared of the big bad wolf.
Piscatella: Not everyone wants to play GTA. All of the other people who want to buy a video game — what are they going to do? I don’t know. Maybe they’re going to buy old stuff. They’ll play Fortnite or Roblox.
GamesBeat: Getting back to the elephant in the room, how are we feeling now that we’re almost to zero hour with GTA? What’s the vibe check here?
Piscatella: After the reveal, everything coming out about the pre-orders from Take-Two sounds very positive. Strauss Zelnick was commenting in a recent earnings call about how they don’t even know how to interpret all of this stuff because, again, we haven’t seen anything like this ever. Their pre-orders are strong, but they don’t really know what that means.
Everything’s going as expected. I think the real wild card in everything is, what are people who want to buy a PlayStation or Xbox to play GTA but haven’t yet going to do? What happens to them when they show up and see that the box is around $700, compared to what they’re expecting (which is probably around $300-400)?
What is that impact going to be? Will there even be units there to buy? The hardware is probably a bigger wild card than the game itself.
I’m expecting this to be everything that it’s hyped to be. The one difference, though, is that back when GTA V launched, the addressable install base was much higher for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox than it currently is for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. But you know, we’ll see if that matters. It might not.
GamesBeat: I was curious about something. In the report, you noted an uptick in hardware sales, especially PS5 sales. My first thought was that, since Marvel’s Wolverine is right there on the list, that that was its doing. But now I’m wondering, how much of that do you think was actually people getting PS5s to prepare for GTA VI?
Piscatella: We look at the weekly cadence. We did see some upticks after the Netflix reveal, but then the uptick for Marvel’s Wolverine’s launch week was far bigger. Ballpark, that positive impact was probably 70% driven by Wolverine, 30% GTA VI, but it’s all squishy numbers.
The thing is, though, when you look at PlayStation 5 compared to Xbox Series — Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out on both platforms, whether people know it or not — the Xbox Series numbers were bad. It was the lowest September ever for Xbox, 27% below last year in units. So there was no impact of the GTA VI reveal on Xbox, or no noticeable positive impact, at least. It’s hard to parse out individual contributing factors, but that’s my gut read looking at the data.
GamesBeat: All of those games that were hiding from GTA in September, how has that strategy worked out for them so far? September was an extremely crowded month, and I noticed most of the bestseller list for the month is new games.
Piscatella: It’s new games that are appealing to different audiences on different platforms. There’s a really wide mix of different kinds of games that all performed similarly well. War Dogs, Halloween, Ace Combat did very well. It shows that there are different parts of this market, and people wanting to play different things.
It takes me back to your earlier question. Could you have put some of those in November? Sure. October? Sure. Getting it in September? That’s cool, too. There’s room in the market for all kinds of games that can all do pretty darned well. Eight out the ten bestsellers in the month is great to see.
[September’s chart has] a really wide mix of different kinds of games that all performed similarly well… It shows that there are different parts of this market, and people wanting to play different things.
We still have a lot of holdovers on the year-to-date list — also great to see. Games are selling and they’re doing well. But was September too crowded? Probably. We just kind of changed the problem. Then again, there are no open windows anymore. That just doesn’t happen.
GamesBeat: Do you think that’s going to work for October’s launches? They’re going out until roughly three-quarters of the way through October, then the whole thing kind of falls off.
Piscatella: With October, the real wild card is Call of Duty. The last couple of years haven’t been the best. Last year, poor performance was blamed on its inclusion in Game Pass on day one. It was bad math, basically assuming that everyone who played Call of Duty on Game Pass would have bought it otherwise, which is the same thing as piracy math.
I don’t know if coming off of Game Pass is actually going to lead to a really big improvement in sales. We’re going to have to wait and see. That’ll be the game that really drives what happens in October. I think that’s its own problem that’s not connected to GTA.
GamesBeat: It’s not, but I’m curious to know who’s going to wind up as the big dog until GTA comes in.
Piscatella: Well, if it’s not Call of Duty, then Call of Duty’s got bigger problems.
GamesBeat: Were you surprised to see any games on the charts for September?
Piscatella: Halloween was one! I had to check a few times just to make sure, and that actually did pretty darned well.
GamesBeat: I appreciate you being willing to jump on a call with me!
Piscatella: Always happy to! It’s funny, I’m getting asked the question a lot — not just from media folks, but from clients and everyone else: What happens after GTA? I don’t know, man. It’s a great question. I guess we’re all gonna find out. Because we’ve all been waiting for how many years now? “Wait until GTA comes out, and then we’re gonna see all these other things happen! Everything’s gonna be better!”
We’ll find out. I’m sure it’ll be very fun, and everyone will be very level-headed about it all.
GamesBeat: I’m sure everyone will be perfectly reasonable about the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Piscatella: Yep, there will be no freak out. Nothing. Everything will be fine.