The Extended Look sold consoles: PS5 up 33%, Xbox up 34% in a week

UK console sales jumped in the week after Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, with PS5 up 33% and Xbox Series X/S up 34% week on week, on NielsenIQ figures.

What makes those numbers worth reporting is the market they landed in. UK console sales were down 14.4% year on year by the end of July, and PS5 on its own was down 32%. A category in that state doesn't add a third in a week by itself. PS5 Pro stock sold out at several UK retailers within days, Sony's own store included.

And both numbers went up by almost exactly the same amount, which is the bit I keep coming back to.

Both consoles rose together

When a platform exclusive drives hardware, one line goes up and the other doesn't. That's the whole logic of an exclusive. Here the two lines rose within a percentage point of each other, so people weren't picking a side. They were buying a machine, any machine, that'll run this game in November.

That happens less often than you'd think. You need a game that people see as belonging to nobody's platform, and an audience big enough that the people who still don't own a current-generation console are a real market, five years into the PS5 and Xbox Series generation.

It also quietly knocks a hole in the usual argument for exclusives. The biggest hardware-selling event of the year belonged to neither platform holder.

Rockstar's install base problem

Grand Theft Auto V sold to an audience that had had years to buy the hardware, and then sold again across two more hardware generations after that.

Grand Theft Auto 6 launches into a generation a lot of people never upgraded to, partly because of the shortages that ran through 2020 and 2021 and partly because there wasn't much reason to. A PlayStation 4 still plays most of what its owner wants.

Rockstar needs those people to buy a console before they can buy the game, and it's the only company in the industry with enough pull to make that happen at scale. A 33% week is what the start of that looks like.

What a 33% week doesn't tell you

It isn't 33% of the market, and it isn't a record. It's a week-on-week rise against whatever the previous week happened to be, in a quiet part of the year, in one country.

Weekly UK hardware figures come from trade sources, they get revised, and they swing on things as dull as a retailer running a promotion. A single strong week after a big trailer is normal behaviour, and it's not worth reading more into it than that.

Three dates to watch

12 November, when preloading opens, which is the point where anyone who hasn't bought a console runs out of runway.

19 November itself.

And the weeks either side of Christmas, because a console bought in November for this game is a console that then needs a second game.

One good week after a big trailer is normal. Three months of them would be the story, and it'd be the clearest evidence yet that this launch is doing something to the hardware market that no other game can right now.

The specific percentages are reported figures from the trade, not audited ones, so treat them that way.