I personally agree that pre-buying is silly in today's world of digital distribution. But I will point out that most pre-sales now come with a digital item or two or five that's exclusive to pre-orders. Additionally, if you pre-order, you can sometimes download the game a day or so ahead of time, and then have it "unlock" when it's released, allowing you to play at minute 1. I'd wager GTA VI is well over 100 GBs, so this is actually a reasonable benefit, especially considering the potential for CDN crashes at launch time.

That's right. I forgot about the ability to pre-download the game before the official release, which might help the servers. That also remove the joke "Patch day 1 (of the size of the game)" which I always found ridiculous but became a standard practice.

Having the game of that size is the only excuse I accept for not releasing a physical version, but because no blu-ray will handle it, it starts darker days for game preservation. I love the fact that I will be able to undust my old PS4 in a couple of years and play GTA V without relying on the PlayStation Store. But we knew these days were counted.