Take-Two’s financial report suggests that the publisher’s next moneymaker won’t be released for another fiscal year.

Grand Theft Auto V has already sold over 195 million copies, and Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold over 61 million copies. The former has been a huge success, and the game’s online mode, Grand Theft Auto Online, is making Take-Two a lot of money at the expense of single-player content, which is now eagerly awaiting Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar Games has been working on this for several years.

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, was asked by a BMO Capital Markets analyst in the publisher’s quarterly report how they and Rockstar would determine the release date for Grand Theft Auto VI. He gave this answer: “We strive for perfection. And when we feel like we’ve creatively tweaked it, that’s when we release it. And we’re all in this together. In terms of motivations and incentives, the financial incentives of everyone who works in this company are aligned with those of the shareholders. So we essentially have — call it what you will, we have profit sharing plans throughout the company at the operating level, and at the executive level, compensation is largely driven by TSR. So our goal is to align the interests of everyone who works there with the interests of the shareholders. So we are all pulling in the same direction. So you’re right, there’s potentially an inherent tension between bringing something to market and creating perfection, but this company errs on the side of perfection.”

The net booking for fiscal year 2025 (which starts in April this year) was over $8 billion, and that has been changed, so it’s possible that Grand Theft Auto VI won’t be released until April 2025 at the earliest, but more likely next fall. Lainie Goldstein, Chief Financial Officer of Take-Two, spoke about the changes: “At this point, the number is tracking a little over $7 billion for net bookings for the year and given the typical shifts in adjustments that occur in our forecasting process. This is still a tremendous amount of growth for the year. Our pipeline is groundbreaking for next year and beyond, and the teams are making excellent progress on game development. For fiscal year ’25, as I mentioned, it’s really driven by changes in the release schedule. And obviously, that’s going to push some of the titles out into future years because the lifetime value of our portfolio hasn’t changed. We expect growth in fiscal ’26 over ’25, so that hasn’t changed.

So we will probably have to wait another year and a half for Grand Theft Auto VI…

Source: WCCFTech