Highlights
- Take-Two Interactive's latest earnings call suggests that Grand Theft Auto 6 is planned to release within the next 20 months, aligning with previous insider reports and the company's financial forecasts.
- The game could release during Take-Two's fiscal year 2025, which ends in March 2025, indicating a potential launch in late 2024 based on historical release patterns.
- While the exact release window is not confirmed, Take-Two's anticipation of a "significant inflection point" in fiscal 2025 hints at a possible release of Grand Theft Auto 6 during that timeframe.
Take-Two Interactive has provided yet another indication that Grand Theft Auto 6 is planned to release within the next 20 months. This bit of insight into the company's near-term plans arrived as part of its latest earnings call, which also saw Take-Two defend the price of the Red Dead Redemption Switch port.
The next installment in the long-running series is currently expected to release during Take-Two's fiscal year 2025, which ends in March 2025. That rumored Grand Theft Auto 6 release window is based on several recent insider reports, as well as Take-Two's own financial forecasts which repeatedly signaled that the company is anticipating a robust revenue boost during its forthcoming fiscal year.
The publisher has now reiterated that expectation as part of its August 8 earnings call covering the first quarter of its fiscal year 2024, with CEO Strauss Zelnick claiming that the company has positioned itself for a "significant inflection point in fiscal 2025." Elaborating on that point, the executive said that Take-Two is expecting "record levels of operating performance" during the 12-month period ending March 2025, which some industry watchers are interpreting as a hint that Grand Theft Auto 6 is planned to release in this timeframe.
That's not to say that the game's launch window is set in stone, not least because analysts had already misinterpreted one such Take-Two forecast from early 2022 as a sign that GTA 6 will be out by March 2024. Seeing how the game hasn't even been unveiled yet, and given the publisher's historical preference for elongated marketing campaigns, that prediction is extremely unlikely to come true.
But assuming that Grand Theft Auto 6 is indeed targeting a release in Take-Two's fiscal year 2025, that plausibly means that the game is meant to hit the market near the end of 2024. All 3D entries in the franchise except for GTA 4 followed that trend, having been historically released around October. That timeframe also corresponds with a recent leak from an established Rockstar insider who claimed that GTA 6 is targeting a holiday 2024 release, noting that the game might still end up getting delayed over Rockstar's struggles to retain developer talent due to the mandatory return-to-office policy that the company introduced following the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whatever the case might be, the fact that Take-Two itself is currently telling investors to prepare for a historically lucrative fiscal year 2025 does inspire hope that GTA 6 will see the light of day in the foreseeable future. After all, the publisher has but one IP that could fuel such unprecedented growth building on its already imposing $5.35 billion in annual revenue.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is in development.
Source: VGC