Circana Analyst Thinks Studios Panicked Over GTA 6 for Nothing

The list of people telling the games industry to calm down about Grand Theft Auto VI keeps growing and the latest name arguably carries the most weight. Mat Piscatella, the director of video games at Circana, says the fear of GTA 6 is overblown and the stampede of publishers moving their release dates is "more irrational than rational."

In an interview with GamesBeat, Piscatella is saying that, "Everyone's just scared." His point is not that GTA 6 will be small, it will be enormous, but there's no panic around it. He explains that it makes sense for the industry to shuffle things around, yet he also believes the industry has talked itself into treating one launch as a threat to everything around it.

Because so many publishers fled from the next Grand Theft Auto, they piled into other months instead. Piscatella notes there are no open windows left anywhere, the exact crowding Bloomberg described when it laid out why everyone cleared November. The one window that is wide open now belongs to GTA 6, since everybody cleared out of its way. The fear created the very pileup it was trying to dodge, just on other dates.

Piscatella is not alone in saying this. An ex-Rockstar developer warned the industry against running scared, Nintendo has been willing to launch right next to it and even Activision argued GTA 6 would be good for Call of Duty by pulling lapsed players back to their consoles.

Part of Piscatella's case is simple, not everyone wants GTA. "Not every one of the 49 million people who own a PS5 or an Xbox Series in the U.S." is going to buy it, he says. The tens of millions on Switch cannot play it at all. Cozy games, life sims and shooters have an audience. The players who skip GTA 6 will still spend on something, whether that is a new release, Fortnite or an old favorite.

When you look back at how history has treated GTA and its contemporaries, Piscatella's words ring even truer. When Grand Theft Auto V arrived in 2013 it took more than half of all software dollars that month, yet Madden NFL 25, NBA 2K14 and FIFA 14 still charted right behind it. Grand Theft Auto IV did the same in 2008, lifting US sales 47 percent year over year while Mario Kart Wii outsold the PS3 version of GTA IV that month and finished second overall. Red Dead Redemption 2 set October records in 2018 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 still took the month's top sales spot.

Big Rockstar launches dominate the charts and lift the whole industry, they do not wipe everything else off the board.

Unfortunately, the games that get squeezed are usually the smaller ones and the ones in the same lane as the giant. The Wii U title_The Wonderful 101_ was a potential casualty of the GTA V window, among other factors. GTA 6 is a different scale again, the first game this big in about thirteen years, so some caution is fair. Piscatella even argues that the console hardware is a bigger wild card than the game, with a pricey PS5 and a smaller install base compared to GTA V.

Publishers weren't wrong to be careful but they have tiptoed around GTA 6 too much. History says that a monster release and a healthy market can share the same month. When GTA 6 launches on November 19, the games brave enough to stand near it may find there was more room than anyone thought.