If you read anything about GTA 6 pre-orders in late June, you read that the game made a billion dollars in its first hour. It was everywhere. It is also not a measurement.

The figure originated with Anthony Palomba, a professor at the University of Virginia, who produced it as an estimate derived from Take-Two's stock movement after pre-orders opened on June 25. That is a legitimate thing for an academic to do. It is not a sales report, and it was never presented as one. It became one somewhere between the original quote and the fortieth aggregator.

On July 16, Newzoo published actual first-week tracking. Their number: roughly $180 million across the United States and the five biggest European markets, extrapolating to about $260 million worldwide for the first week. Newzoo went out of its way to say that a billion dollars in a week was "very unlikely" — never mind an hour.

A second claim was doing the rounds at the same time: 39 million pre-orders and $3 billion in revenue, posted by an account called ValueEntertainment. That one has no basis at all. There is no source, no methodology, no partial data. It is a number someone typed.

Here is the thing worth holding onto. Take-Two has published exactly zero pre-order figures. Not units, not revenue, not regional splits. Every number you have seen is a third-party estimate, and the gap between the best of them and the worst of them is a factor of ten.

What we do have from Take-Two is guidance: $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for FY2027, up about 20% year over year, against $6.72 billion in FY2026. Newzoo's own launch-week projection lands between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion, or 37 to 51 million copies, for the week ending November 26.

Those are still forecasts. But they come with a stated method, which is more than can be said for most of what went viral last month. We have logged both bad numbers in our leaks tracker as debunked.