GTA 6 sales likely won’t be affected by the game’s launch window, according to Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
Yesterday, GTA 6 publisher and Rockstar owner Take-Two Interactive confirmed that the highly-anticipated next entry in the franchise would be released in the fall of 2025. Some hoped that the title would be released in early 2025, but that won’t be the case. During the company’s most recent earnings call with investors, CEO Straus Zelnick was asked whether a release during the 2025 holiday season would have an additive effect. According to Zelnick, releasing the game in early 2025 or late 2025 likely won’t matter. “While it probably doesn’t matter, I think we’d all rather be in the release window that we’re looking at now”, the CEO said during the earnings call.
It’s clear that Take-Two has high confidence in the next Grand Theft Auto (we can’t blame them with 2013’s GTA V selling over 200 million copies), and as expressed by Zelnick during the same call, the game is expected to move a lot of consoles. In addition, the CEO expects that going by projects from research firm IDG, around 111 million consoles will be sold globally by the end of 2024. According to Zelnick, IDG projected that 81 million consoles have been sold worldwide by the end of 2023. This implies that an additional 30 million consoles will be sold throughout this year. Zelnick only mentions “Gen 9” consoles, which include the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles. Since we know that Sony managed to sell 55 million PS5 consoles as of December 31, 2023 – this means that around 26 million Xbox Series consoles are projected to be sold as of last year.
“We are using IDG’s projections, which are pretty substantial”, Zelnick said. “So for Gen 9 alone, their view is that they’re about 81 million consoles worldwide currently that was at the end of the last year, they project that will rise to 111 million by the end of this year and 175 million by the end of 2027. Now we don’t necessarily subscribe or not subscribe to those views, but that shows an awful lot of growth. And we do expect a very significant attach rate.”
Although these aren’t confirmed numbers, it’s pretty interesting to see the difference in sales numbers between consoles, and how Take-Two expects that GTA 6 will indeed by a system seller.
