Grand Theft Auto Revs Up Big Revenue

We got a pandemic, ChatGPT and 31 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies before we got Grand Theft Auto VI. Earlier this month, we even got a blue Texas.

But the game, whose twice-delayed release became a meme about the nonstop passage of time, is finally scheduled to launch this Thursday, Nov. 19. Grand Theft Auto VI, or GTA VI for short, will take players to a virtual Florida called Leonida where they’ll tear up the streets of Vice City as criminal power couple Lucia and Jason. 

The game isn’t just expected to be the largest video game release of all time, but one of the largest entertainment releases of all time — just like its predecessor Grand Theft Auto V was back in 2013. 

Small Screen, Big Bucks

Grand Theft Auto’s fifth installment became the largest entertainment release by revenue when it earned about $816 million in its first 24 hours. Within three days, it made $1 billion, faster than any game or movie. That record still stands.

But GTA V’s records could be shattered like a pawn shop window this week:

• When GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive reiterated its full-year guidance last Tuesday, it said preorders were running far ahead of its initial expectations. 
• Gaming analytics firm Newzoo tracked about $180 million in digital preorders across the US and Europe’s five biggest markets in the game’s first week on sale — Newzoo called it “the strongest opening to a preorder campaign ever recorded in our dataset.”

So if your coworker is OOO this week … don’t be surprised. Requests for PTO on GTA VI’s launch day are running 13% higher than on the same day in past years, per BambooHR. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in April that “a lot of people will be calling in sick on November 19.”

Players will be counting on the P part of PTO. GTA VI costs $80 for the bare-bones version and $100 for the Ultimate Edition that comes with “his and hers” handguns for the happy couple and a ’95 Grotti Cheetah to wave them around in. During preorders, most people are splurging for the extra perks:

• Nearly nine in 10 digital preorders in the game’s opening week were for the Ultimate Edition, Newzoo told The Daily Upside. 
• “Early buyers are the most committed fans, so I’d expect the standard edition’s share to grow as more casual buyers arrive around launch,” per Newzoo.

Wedbush predicts Take-Two will sell 32.3 million copies of GTA VI during the game’s launch quarter, driving the company’s net bookings (basically sales) to about $3.5 billion. That’s the top end of Take-Two’s own forecast of $3.35 billion to $3.5 billion and nearly double the $1.76 billion the publisher brought in during the same period last year.

After the initial launch, sales are expected to keep rolling, just in a lower gear. The real money engine revs up later, when Rockstar (the Take-Two-owned studio that develops GTA) is widely expected to launch an online version of the game, just like it did for GTA V.

Double-Barreled Business Model

Rockstar broke ground with 2013’s GTA Online — even if it was so glitchy at the outset that the studio issued a stimulus package of $500,000 of in-game currency per player to make up for early meltdowns.

The online version made GTA V’s Los Santos map free for anyone who bought the main game, allowing them to speed through red lights (or drive safely, your call). Any updates Rockstar rolled out over time were also free.

Where Rockstar made money was GTA Online’s in-game economy, full of players buying Shark Cards — bundles of in-game cash that cost $2.99 to $99.99 in real money — to splurge on, for instance, building a nightclub that generates passive income. Thirteen years later, GTA Online continues to bring in money for Take-Two:

• GTA Online still brings in nearly $500 million a year for Take-Two, according to Rockstar data that leaked in April. About 14% of PlayStation and Xbox players tracked by Newzoo across 37 markets were still playing GTA V this June. “An online mode is what turns a launch into a decade of revenue,” Newzoo told The Daily Upside. 
• Online modes have become a major revenue generator, with 84% of Take-Two’s net bookings coming from players’ spending inside games in the quarter ending June 30. That includes GTA, but Wedbush analyst Alicia Reese assured The Daily Upside that Take-Two isn’t a “one-trick pony.” Players also spend real cash on virtual items inside titles like NBA 2K and mobile games like Words With Friends under Take-Two’s subsidiary Zynga. 

While Take-Two hasn’t officially announced an online mode for GTA VI, Bloomberg reported in October that one is expected in 2027. “They’ve had GTA Online for a long time now. They know how it works. They know how to extract the highest monetization and provide the most value,” Reese said. 

Forgoing the Fortnite Model

Other games at the time of GTA Online’s release made money within their games, but most didn’t charge players for the initial download. That’s the “freemium” model that games like League of Legends popularized and modern titles like Fortnite have continued to capitalize on. Instead of ever releasing Fortnite 2, Epic Games continuously drops new “seasons” full of free content, counting on players to spend money on in-game items. 

While Grand Theft Auto could theoretically go the Fortnite route and stop releasing sequels, it’d be a massive revenue miss. The property has the gravitas to charge $80 for its initial release, an amount Newzoo told The Daily Upside only the biggest franchises can pull off. There’s a trade-off Take-Two could one day reckon with though, especially as gamers that grew up playing free games like Roblox grow up: whether GTA would make more money if more players could join its virtual world for free and spend cash in the game versus charging for the initial download. 

For GTA VI, the current business model will help Take-Two earn back what it’s invested in building the game:

• In order to build the behemoth that is GTA VI, Rockstar nearly doubled its headcount to about 4,700 people across 12 offices (since 2018, when development ramped up) and made foundational changes to the in-house engine it uses to build games. 
• Rockstar even set up a satellite office in Los Angeles just to make the game’s nonplayable characters more lifelike. In a sign of the game’s massive scale, GTA VI’s NPCs are made up of more than 600,000 animations. The ones in GTA V had about 55,000.

Take-Two has never confirmed how much the game cost to make, but industry analysts estimate it cost $1 billion to $1.5 billion — roughly what it took to build the Burj Khalifa. Sales of console games are expected to grow 17.5% this year, per Newzoo, which says GTA VI is the single biggest reason. Without the game, Newzoo expects overall console spending would fall this year. 

Grand Ambitions

Grand Theft Auto wants it both ways: standalone sequels that spin off into online worlds that keep making money for years. “What GTA V shows is that the two models aren’t exclusive: It has worked as a standalone game and as a live service with regular updates for 13 years,” Newzoo said. And the money is expected to start moving faster for Take-Two after GTA VI: The company has 22 more games in the pipeline, and the next GTA is expected to take much less time than 13 years to make.

While concerns abound about GTA sucking the air out of the room for other releases — including titles that have been delayed to make room for GTA — Newzoo told us, “Even after accounting for the pressure on competing titles, our view is that GTA VI will grow the market rather than simply redistribute it.”

In a time when the gaming industry is beset with layoffs and studio closures, a megahit like GTA VI attracts cash to the industry and reminds developers that, with enough time and money, they can fulfill players’ dreams of pulling off the perfect bank heist, going on a high-speed car chase or two and even throwing photorealistic dog poop at NPCs.