GTA 6 Might Be Coming Out as Soon as Next Year
Publisher Take-Two Interactive may have just teased the release window for the next entry in the biggest gaming franchise of all time: Grand Theft Auto 6. It could be on the way as soon as next year.
In a press release issued alongside its yearly earnings report, Take-Two shared projections for the coming years, including a massive projection for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. For context, fiscal 2025 will begin in April of 2024:
Looking ahead, Fiscal 2025 is a highly anticipated year for our Company," the release states. "For the last several years, we have been preparing our business to release an incredibly robust pipeline of projects that we believe will take our company to even greater levels of success. In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow. We expect to sustain this momentum by delivering even higher levels of operating results in Fiscal 2026 and beyond.
While Take-Two doesn't explicitly name Grand Theft Auto here, it's hard to imagine any other franchise doing this work for them. For one, Take-Two's net bookings this past fiscal year reached $5.3 billion - a record annual high. Notably, this record was reached thanks to the contributions of Zynga, which it acquired last year. Prior to this, Take-Two's regular annual net bookings were looking roughly in $3 billion ballpark and steadily rising - it took the acquisition of a major mobile developer to see them leap over $1 billion in the space of a single year.
So to achieve a goal of $8 billion, Take-Two would need to make significant acquisitions, or release nearly double the amount of games it historically has, or release at least one absolute behemoth of a game. Notably, Take-Two expects to do even better in its takings the following year, something that seems impossible without something like GTA Online built on the foundations of a brand new GTA game to propel its revenue sky high. It's hard to imagine any other franchise, or even multiple new games combined, doing these kinds of numbers.
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I asked Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick about my theory on a call today ahead of its earnings announcement, and he declined to confirm or deny it, noting that it's not Take-Two's practice to talk about specific, unannounced titles in earnings reports such as this.
Grand Theft Auto V remains the best-selling single game of all time, and has consistently sold roughly five million unit per quarter for the last several years. It achieved this once again in the last quarter, bringing its total unit sales up to 180 million, and GTA Online continues to be a major revenue driver for Take-Two. Developer Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 was in active development last year, but has otherwise officially kept quiet on its progress. A massive leak late last year showed off some of the incomplete game, but Zelnick told IGN a few months later that while this was an "emotional matter" for developers, it hadn't impacted the business.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Source: IGN
