Publisher Take-Two Interactive may have just hinted at the release window for the next entry in the greatest gaming franchise of all time: Grand Theft Auto 6. It could be out as early as next year.
In a press release that accompanied the annual earnings report, Take-Two shared guidance for the coming years, including a comprehensive guidance for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. For comparison, fiscal 2025 begins April 2024:
“Looking ahead, fiscal 2025 is a highly anticipated year for our company,” the press release said. “Over the past several years, we have prepared our company to release an incredibly robust pipeline of projects that we believe will take our company even further.” In fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era with the launch of several game-changing titles that we believe will set new benchmarks in our industry and allow us to exceed $8 billion in net bookings and generate over $1 billion in adjusted unconstrained cash flow from operations. We expect to be able to maintain this momentum by delivering even higher operating results in fiscal 2026 and beyond.
While Take-Two doesn’t explicitly name Grand Theft Auto here, it’s hard to imagine another franchise doing the work for them. For one, Take-Two’s net bookings reached $5.3 billion last fiscal year — a record high for the year. This record was achieved thanks in particular to the contributions of Zynga, which the company acquired last year. Previously, Take-Two’s annual net bookings were around $3 billion and growing steadily — it took the acquisition of a major wireless developer to jump over $1 billion in a single year.
So, to hit the $8 billion goal, Take-Two would need to make significant acquisitions, or release almost twice as many games as it has in the past, or release at least one absolute giant game. In particular, Take-Two expects to generate even better earnings in the following year, which seems impossible without something like GTA Online, which is building on the foundation of a brand new GTA game and skyrocketing its earnings. It’s hard to imagine any other franchise, or even multiple new games combined, would achieve numbers like this.
I asked Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick about my theory in a phone call today ahead of the earnings announcement, and he declined to confirm or deny that.
Grand Theft Auto V remains the best-selling single game of all time, consistently selling about five million units per quarter for the past several years. He did so again in the last quarter, and total sales rose to 180 million. GTA Online continues to be a key revenue driver for Take-Two. Developer Rockstar confirmed last year that GTA 6 was in active development, but otherwise kept official silence on progress. A massive leak late last year revealed part of the incomplete game, but Zelnick told IGN a few months later that while it was an “emotional matter” for the developers, it hadn’t impacted the business.
Rebekah Valentine is senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.