GTA Online launched back in 2013, yet here we are in 2026 and Rockstar’s aging online cash machine is still generating more than a million dollars in profit every single day. On paper, that sounds like the kind of problem any publisher would happily accept. In reality, though, it is a far more awkward situation than it first appears. Because with only a few months left before GTA VI arrives, Rockstar now has to face the fact that the empire it built around GTA Online may be one of the biggest obstacles to launching a new multiplayer era.

The whole story became much more revealing after Rockstar’s recent data breach. On April 11, the ShinyHunters group gained access to internal information through a vulnerability in the company’s cloud management software. Rockstar confirmed the attack, although it said the impact on operations was limited. What ended up leaking was not code from GTA VI or marketing material for the new game, but business metrics pulled from the internal analytics platform Anodot. And those numbers were not bad news for Take-Two. If anything, they were so good that the company’s stock reportedly rose once the data became public.

According to the leaked information, GTA Online averaged $9.59 million per week between September 2025 and April 2026, with peak weeks pushing close to $28 million. Annualized, that puts the game somewhere around the $500 million mark. So yes, an online mode attached to a game released in 2013 is still making more than a million dollars a day. That is impressive enough on its own, but it becomes much more complicated once you start asking what that means for GTA VI.

Rockstar’s Biggest Success Has Also Become One of GTA VI’s Biggest Rivals

The backbone of the model remains the Shark Cards, those virtual currency packs players buy for cars, properties, weapons, and other luxuries inside the game. Between 2014 and 2024, they brought in more than $5 billion, and the truly wild part is that only around 4 percent of the active player base spent real money at all. Those are the classic whales, the users who effectively carry the whole economy on their backs. In that sense, GTA Online has quietly adopted the same financial logic as the most aggressive free-to-play games, except it did so while hiding under the umbrella of a premium release.

On top of that, there is GTA+, the monthly subscription Rockstar introduced in 2022. According to the leaked figures, it hit a peak of 1.3 million subscribers in December 2025, right when the A Safehouse in the Hills update landed. That patch added luxury mansions and brought back Michael, one of the protagonists of GTA V. In other words, Rockstar has not just kept the game alive. It has continued to build and refresh it like a modern live-service machine rather than a relic from two console generations ago.

Those same numbers also help explain why Rockstar more or less stopped investing seriously in Red Dead Online. According to the leak, that game averaged about $507,000 a week between June 2024 and April 2026. Against GTA Online’s $9.59 million weekly average, that is barely worth mentioning. Take-Two knew exactly where the money was, and it acted accordingly.

The Real Problem Is Getting Players to Move On

Rockstar still has not officially detailed the online component of GTA VI, but hardly anyone doubts that the game will launch with some kind of multiplayer offering. That is where the real dilemma begins. Back in February, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he had every reason to believe the company would continue supporting GTA Online, pointing to its large and highly engaged community. But that also implies the possibility of two live services operating side by side, each demanding updates, support, development attention, and player time.

There is precedent for that. When GTA Online arrived on PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, Rockstar did not immediately shut down the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Both generations coexisted for more than a year, receiving the same content, and the final major update for the older systems only came in 2015. The servers themselves were not permanently turned off until December 2021, six years later. It is entirely possible Rockstar follows a similar but much larger transition this time.

The real issue, however, is not purely technical. It is psychological and economic. If GTA VI Online launches as a separate service, then it begins from zero. It will not have twelve years of accumulated updates, thousands of missions, giant collections of properties, custom vehicles, businesses, and character progress. Many GTA Online players have spent years building all of that, and it is hard to imagine them happily abandoning it just to start over. There is still no serious talk about transferring assets between the two games either, which is not surprising given the design and balance nightmare that would create. And that is before even mentioning FiveM, the community roleplay platform Rockstar acquired in 2023, which remains a major ecosystem of its own.

The most likely outcome is a long coexistence. GTA Online will probably stay alive for years while Rockstar slowly tries to migrate part of the audience toward the new game. Whether that ends up looking like a managed sunset, indefinite support with only minor updates, or something in between will depend entirely on how quickly GTA VI Online can establish itself. Because one thing is certain: even if the most anticipated new game in years is about to arrive, its multiplayer component will still have to compete with a monster Rockstar itself spent the last twelve years creating.

Source: Xataka