Even after years of development, fans of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto franchise will need to wait a little longer for the series’ much-anticipated follow-up to GTA 5, at least according to a recent interview with Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick.
Zelnick was asked point blank about GTA 6’s ship date in an interview on CNBC’s Squark on the Street show on Aug. 9. While as evasive as one would expect by reiterating his desire to leave announcements of that nature to Rockstar themselves, he did allude to 2025 being an unusually good fiscal year for them, setting an estimate of eight billion dollars in total revenue.
He stated Take-Two has a “great outlook for fiscal [year] 2025” and called it a “pretty exciting time,” but shied away from dropping any specific names. A May 22 interview on the same show saw Zelnick similarly duck the question, only confirming that Rockstar was “working on the next iteration of Grand Theft Auto.”
It must be tough to be in Zelnick’s position. He’s probably the single person on the planet who knows with absolute certainty when GTA 6 is going to release, including the developers actually working on the game. But with these sky-high 2025 projections, perhaps Rockstar is eyeing up a release in the not-too-distant future.
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It seems likely that Zelnick expects a major game release to provide the bulk of the company’s expected 2025 cash flow—and given that GTA V crossed the $1 billion USD mark in its first three days, a number of that size seems almost conservative for the hotly-anticipated sequel.
However, speculation like this has been circulating since GTA V first came out in 2013, and given Zelnick’s love for implementing new monetization schemes such as GTA Online, it seems possible that he could also be expecting them to make up some of that colossal sum.
The introduction of the GTA+ subscription service in March 2022 proved that Take-Two hasn’t exhausted every means of getting money from their players yet. 2025, though, sounds just reasonable enough as a GTA 6 release date for me to keep my fingers crossed—for the first time in a while, there’s a glimmer of hope at the end of what has been a very long tunnel.
