How does the CEO of Take-Two feel about the lengthy wait for GTA 6? It doesn’t sound like he’s sweating it too much.
Strauss Zelnick told The Game Business that 15 years ago, some of the kind of content that GTA Online delivers on a regular basis would have “counted as a standalone title.” Today, the executive said, a person could make the case that “Rockstar has been putting out a new Grand Theft Auto release a couple of times a year.”
GTA Online gets weekly updates, but Zelnick is likely referring to the the biggest ones that have added new story content and big new heists. Rockstar apparently originally planned even more expansions for GTA Online, including a James Bond-like DLC focused on Trevor.
Rockstar remaining so dedicated to GTA Online over the years is part of the reason why the game has continued to be so successful–and lucrative. The game features microtransactions as part of Take-Two’s ambition to create ongoing revenue beyond sales of the base game. And those have been strong, too, as GTA 5 just sold another 5 million copies in the past three months to boost its lifetime tally to 215 million.
“Our strategy is when we give consumers a hit, they would like to stay engaged. And that requires our teams to create more content quite properly, to support that content, and to market that content,” Zelnick explained. “The business has become a worldwide, ongoing business. I would argue that Rockstar is delivering to its consumer base daily, and it has been doing that for quite some time, basically since 2014.”
The huge, ongoing success of GTA Online creates an interesting scenario for 2026 when GTA 6 launches. What’s going to happen to GTA Online then? We don’t know, but Zelnick has said GTA Online may stick around in some form when the new game comes out.
Given the immense success of GTA Online, it’s expected that GTA 6 will feature some kind of online element, though as of yet, Rockstar has only focused on the game’s story mode featuring Jason and Lucia.
The long wait for GTA 6 has inspired the “We got ___ before GTA 6” meme, and they’ve become so widespread that even Zelnick has seen some of them.
While fans have to wait until May 2026 to play GTA 6, reports have suggested Rockstar is developing ports of GTA 4 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S and Red Dead Redemption II for Switch 2, and they could launch as soon as later this year.
