Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games might prefer to keep GTA 6 a secret, but they can't hide it forever. In its latest earnings report, Take-Two could have just very well said that the next GTA game would be out by next year.
In a press release launched alongside its annual earnings report, Take-Two shared what its projections were for the future, including a massive jump for the next fiscal year, saying:
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.
Now, why do people think that Take-Two confirmed the launch of GTA 6 with its statement?
For starters, very few games net a billion in revenue in a single fiscal year. To date, no game has ever beaten the record set by Grand Theft Auto V when it came out in 2013.
The second-best-selling video game of all time was amazing at launch, earning $800 million in its first day and a billion in three days. For context, the only other game to have breached the billion-dollar mark within a month of launching since then is Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which reached the mind-boggling figure in 10 days last year.
Even if we go outside the video game industry and include Hollywood, the only movie that comes close to this astronomical number is Avengers: Endgame. The finale to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's The Infinity Saga pulled in a billion at the global box office on its fifth day in theaters.
Furthermore, Take-Two posted a record annual high Net Bookings of $5.3 billion for Fiscal 2023, thanks mostly to its acquisition of Zynga last year. Before this, Take-Two's annual revenue was at a $3 billion clip for a while.
For Take-Two to expect more than $8 billion in Net Bookings from the period of April 2024 to March 2025, which represents a nearly $3 billion jump in two years, suggests that something big is coming.
In the off-chance that this statement isn't hinting at GTA 6, Take-Two could have a different massive acquisition planned alongside a slate of similarly impactful games launching in the next Fiscal Year. But, unless it's a combination of the long-rumored remakes of GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, it's difficult to think of anything else that could make more than a billion in revenue in a single fiscal year.
Ultimately, all the info we have on hand right now suggests that GTA 6 is in its final stages of development at the moment.
Fingers crossed, Rockstar Games will reveal it sooner rather than later. But, then again, it could do what it did with Red Dead Redemption 2 and announce the game's imminent arrival simply by dropping a single image on one of its social media accounts.
It isn't ideal, but this is Rockstar we're talking about here.
