As one of the most anticipated games of the modern era, Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to break videogame sales records, and Take-Two Interactive already telegraphed a potential Holiday 2024 or early 2025 release for the open-world action adventure game. A recent newsletter from a games industry expert Joost van Dreuden recently forecasted that GTA 6 sales will be around 25 million.
"Assuming a 2025 launch window, which is optimistic given the publisher's propensity for delays, early estimates expect the new title to sell 25 million units," van Dreunen claims (via superjoost.substack.com)
Take Two Interactive recently provided full-year guidance for 2025 that showed a $2.5 billion year-over-year increase. This indicates to analysts that GTA 6 will be released soon, and Dreunen quoted an analyst who said that GTA 6 is "the only game capable of contributing to a $2.5 billion increase to net bookings". The industry expert continued:
Assuming a 2025 launch window, which is optimistic given the publisher’s propensity for delays, early estimates expect the new title to sell 25 million units. Net bookings for Q4 were $1,394 million compared to a consensus of $1,339 million and guidance of $1,310 to $1,360 million. Shares for Take-Two jumped +12 percent to $140.
According to Tweaktown, who reached out to Dreuden, the 25 million estimate is based on a 20% attach rate for the expected console installed base for 2024-2026, so this means that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S installed bases will be around 125 million by the time. This aligns with Sony's expectations that the PS5 will hit 63.4 million shipments by March 2024.
GTA 6 is expected to sell around 12 to 14 million copies upon its release, which aligns the highly-anticipated game with GTA 5's previous astonishing 11.21 million copies sold within 24 hours.
GTA 5 hit $1 billion in sales in just 3 days, so it shouldn't be surprising if GTA 6 manage to make $1 billion in sales revenue in its first week, but it may not break GTA 5's big release. In its first quarter on the market, GTA 5 shipped a total of 32.5 million copies, and it happened at the final days of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation in September 2013, and GTA 5 was also launched just months before Microsoft and Sony released their Xbox One and Playstation 4 consoles in November 2013.
Just a year later in November 2014, the game was re-released for Xbox One and PS4, so Rockstar Games was able to make the most from both console generations for GTA 5 sales. However, it's hard to tell exactly how well GTA 6 will sell since these are just predictions based on predictions.
Will GTA 6 release on PS4 and Xbox One?
Although many players are hoping for the game to be released on the previous generations of videogame consoles, it's likely that GTA 6 will not be released on the aging PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware, and there are multiple reasons why such as hardware limitations, market saturation, and new features in next-gen consoles.
Furthermore, the new features in the Enhanced and Expanded versions are exclusive to the latest consoles, even though the older consoles have nearly the same game structure. This implies that GTA 6 will only be exclusive to the latest consoles. Although Rockstar and Take Two Interactive will likely miss out on sales of these consoles, it's likely that GTA 6 will be re-released in the future generation of consoles and PC.
