Now that we are mere days from 2025, GTA 6 is starting to materialize as the proverbial elephant in the room, something that nobody in the gaming industry will be able to ignore one way or the other when it ships next Fall.
Rockstar owner Take-Two is certainly eager to repeat the success of Grand Theft Auto 5, which became the second best-selling game of all time after Minecraft with over 200 million units sold. CEO Strauss Zelnick recently spoke a bit about the next Grand Theft Auto in a video interview with Conner Mather, hyping it up with a single sentence:
I would say I think it’ll be extraordinary and worth waiting for.
Later in the chat, Zelnick spoke in more general terms about the GTA community’s feedback, and he seemed to hint that Rockstar has prepared features and content the fans might not even have dreamed of for GTA 6.
We definitely listen to feedback from our fans, absolutely. You need to, in our business, and you’re able to. But remember, the biggest hits are always the ones that are unexpected. Everything that we do has to be new and different, not derivative. So, by definition when people are commenting on something that is in the market, that means they’re looking at something that was done before. Our teams are focused on what’s new that you haven’t even thought about, like, you thought you were anticipating this thing, but this is way bigger and way better and more exciting and more beautiful than you could have possibly thought of.
Looking back at GTA 5 and GTA Online (which just got an update for the Holidays), Zelnick revealed that Take-Two never thought the game would sell this much or that the Online mode would get more popular. In fact, it wasn’t even going to have a virtual currency in the original plans.
I don’t think any of us did. I think that we saw it as a really interesting add-on to the title. We actually originally had not planned to have virtual currency in the game, so it wasn’t going to be an economic driver. It was relatively late in the day when we decided to pursue virtual currency because it was so long ago – we’re looking back to 2013. And it wasn’t an immediate success. You may recall it was pretty buggy at first. We had some trouble coming out of the gate because it was all new, and we were innovating; we were doing it all in real-time. It was like building a plane while you’re taking off and then flying. It is an incredible, durable success and it continues to to perform many, many years later. It’s astonishing and no, I don’t think any of us expected that, but we also didn’t expect to sell 205 million units. We never expected that. That was way outside of the realm of anything we contemplated.
What’s your current hype status for GTA 6? Let us know below.
