Circana analyst calls the fear of launching near GTA 6 "completely overblown" — and says it handed November to Rockstar

Between October 23, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 hit stores, and November 19, GTA 6's launch day, the release slate for big PS5 and Xbox games is close to empty. Mat Piscatella, director of video games at Circana — the firm that tracks game sales in the United States — thinks that was a collective mistake.

"The fear of many teams to put their game in the same window as GTA is completely overblown," he told GamesBeat's Rachel Kaser in an interview published October 23. Dexerto and GTA BOOM picked the quote up on Tuesday (October 27), and it quickly became the talking point of the day for people who follow the business side of games.

Piscatella in his own words

He isn't downplaying the game. "GTA is going to be a massive game," he said, pointing out that it is literally the first release of this scale in 13 years, since GTA V. His point is that size doesn't mean everyone will play it.

"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," he said. Then came the bluntest line of the interview: people who don't want GTA will "play Fortnite or Roblox."

On the publisher exodus, he was less diplomatic: "But ultimately, a lot of these moves and shifting away just seems more irrational than rational, but that's just me." The practical effect, in his view, is that "it's given GTA a completely wide-open window because everyone else moved." He sums it up as "more fear than anything else."

Dexerto framed its headline around Fortnite and Roblox (GTA 6 "won't hurt" them), while GTA BOOM went with the publisher-panic angle. Same interview, different cut.

The risk he sees is the hardware, not the game

The least-quoted part of the conversation may be the most interesting. Piscatella thinks the big unknown this holiday is hardware. He set the current price of a console, "around $700," against what buyers expect to pay, and noted that the PS3 and Xbox 360 install base was proportionally larger back when GTA V came out. Put simply: GTA 6 can sell enormously, but only to people who already own — or are willing to buy — a PS5 or an Xbox Series.

He also broke down September, when PS5 sales rose 22% in the U.S. (we covered that in PS5 up 22% in September: GTA 6 or Wolverine?). By his estimate, the bump was "probably 70% driven by Wolverine, 30% GTA VI" — numbers he himself calls squishy. On Microsoft's side, his verdict was short: "the Xbox Series numbers were bad."

As for pre-orders, he grants that everything coming out of Take-Two "sounds very positive" (the Sensor Tower figures are in our pre-order story). He expects strong spending in November. "Then we'll see what happens in December and January."

What the calendar looks like now

The list below pulls dates from several sources; entries with an asterisk appear only in GTA BOOM's roundup and we haven't confirmed them elsewhere.

The Goat Simulator 3 expansion Ticket to Dizzyworld also lands on November 19 (we covered it here), and GTA BOOM mentions a Devolver Digital title on the same day.

Do the math: Modern Warfare 4 launched 27 days before GTA 6, and the Ocarina of Time remake arrives exactly 14 days before it. Those are the only heavyweight releases in the stretch — and one of them isn't even chasing the same audience, since it's exclusive to Switch 2, a console that isn't getting GTA 6 (the Nintendo–Take-Two conversation about that is in this story).

Activision was already talking about coexistence. Chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl told The Game Business that GTA 6 and the new Call of Duty are "the two biggest games of the year," with a "no offense to Zelda" thrown in (full story here). His argument: more people dusting off their PlayStations and Xboxes for GTA means more players for Call of Duty too. According to VGTimes, a Circana survey found about 15% of U.S. console and PC players planned to buy Modern Warfare 4, versus 10.4% for Ocarina of Time.

What the series' own history says

Piscatella isn't alone, and history backs him up. GTA BOOM points to two precedents:

• GTA IV, April 2008: the game lifted the U.S. market, yet Mario Kart Wii, released the same month, outsold the PS3 version of GTA IV and finished second overall.
• GTA V, September 2013: it took more than half of all software dollars that month, and Madden NFL 25, NBA 2K14 and FIFA 14 still charted right behind it.

Former Rockstar developer Felipe Busquets, who spent about 12 years at the studio (2005–2016), made a similar case back in June in a LinkedIn post summarized by GTA BOOM: by fleeing to September, roughly a dozen games ended up crammed into the same window, fighting over the same players and the same streaming hours — a scenario he argued could be worse than facing November. Piscatella himself says September was probably too crowded, but that the market showed it could carry a lot of titles at once.

What nobody has confirmed

In the sources we read, almost no publisher has said outright that it moved a game because of GTA 6. GTA BOOM's own roundup of games that "fled" the launch admits Microsoft never cited GTA when it dated Forza Horizon 6 for May, and that Pearl Abyss didn't mention it when it locked Crimson Desert for March. The connection is drawn by the press from calendar coincidences — plausible, but never stated.

It's also unclear how much of the "more irrational than rational" verdict holds outside the U.S. Circana tracks the American market, and every figure in this story (the 49 million consoles, September's bump, the purchase-intent survey) comes from there.

And for players in Brazil?

The calendar works the same way there: Modern Warfare 4, the Zelda remake and GTA 6 share the same dates, and Piscatella's warning about hardware carries even more weight in a country where consoles have always been expensive. For anyone who already owns a PS5 or Xbox Series, November will be almost entirely about GTA 6. If you're still choosing an edition, our comparison is in Standard vs Ultimate.

Our take: Piscatella gets the diagnosis right and only overstates the surprise. In 2008 and 2013 there was room for other games next to GTA; in 2026, publishers chose not to test that rule — and the few who stayed are the ones who'll find out whether it still holds.