The long-awaited release of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is set to be the biggest entertainment launch of 2025, bringing a bright spot to the lackluster video game market as it is expected to generate $3 billion in revenue in its first year.
Grand Theft Auto VI, which publisher Take-Two Interactive plans to release on PlayStation and Xbox consoles in the fall, could generate more than $1 billion in pre-orders before its release, according to analysts at video game company DFC Intelligence. The research group said that it has a high degree of sex.
DFC predicts that GTA VI’s total revenue for the first 12 months after its release is expected to reach $3.2 billion, double that of its 2013 predecessor. Such success far dwarfs 2024’s biggest film, “Inside Head 2,” which grossed $1.7 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which grossed $1.3 billion. It will exceed.
“I would never claim victory before it happens,” Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. “That being said, I think[GTA developer]Rockstar Games will once again deliver something absolutely phenomenal. . . . Expectations are certainly high.”
Gamers have been waiting for the latest installment in the cinematic action game series for more than a decade, following a Bonnie and Clyde-esque criminal couple running amok in Vice City. The first GTA VI trailer, released in December 2023, has been viewed over 225 million times on YouTube.
“We think this will be the biggest entertainment launch in history, not just for games but for all media,” said Yoshio Osaki, CEO of gaming-focused IDG Consulting. “The pent-up demand is greater than anything we’ve seen before.”
But GTA VI is an anomaly in a games industry still struggling to recover from a prolonged recession, with layoffs from Sony and Microsoft’s game divisions as well as top publishers including Take-Two, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. connected to. According to a gaming industry layoff tracking site, more than 33,000 people will lose their jobs starting in 2022, including about 15,000 in 2024 alone.
Zelnick acknowledged that he was “a little surprised by the decline in demand” from players starting in 2022 as post-pandemic consumers turned off their screens and returned to live, in-person events. “All of us in the industry have had to do some restructuring,” he said. “We were also a little ahead of the curve in terms of growth expectations.”
Now, Take-Two chiefs believe growth is starting to accelerate again.
“It’s too early to think that this (console) generation is coming of age or reaching its zenith,” Zelnick said. “We’re seeing consumer demand growing across the board, and frankly the (gaming) industry that we lead has a great release schedule scheduled for 2025 and beyond. . . . Hits from companies tend to benefit the industry as a whole.”
Not everyone is so optimistic. Consulting firm Ampere Analysis predicts that consumer spending on gaming content and services will increase by just 2.2% to $195 billion in 2025. This year-on-year growth rate is slightly higher than Ampere’s forecast of 1.4% in 2024, and better than the 4.8% drop between the peak of the pandemic in 2021 and the easing of lockdowns in 2022.
Nevertheless, it pales in comparison to the industry’s massive expansion over the past decade. Spending on gaming content doubled from $95 billion in 2015 to $191 billion in 2021, according to Ampere.
“We’ve grown so much over the past 25 years that it feels like no one knows how to work in an industry that’s not growing,” said game designer and consultant Nicholas Lovell. “We’re a mature business now… we don’t have the money and the market is saturated (with new games).”
According to Matthew Ball, a tech investor and author of “The Metaverse,” even with blockbuster titles like “GTA” and the expected arrival of Nintendo’s new console, the growth rate of the gaming industry will be slowed down. He says it’s not enough to get him back to his previous pace.
“The biggest structural problem facing the industry is the decline in playing time per player and the number of players,” Ball said. This is especially true in the United States, where video apps like TikTok are driving smartphone users away from gaming, he said. At the same time, he added, “The global market for mobile gamers is no longer growing.”
The slowdown in the smartphone market has led to significant disruption from the industry over the past decade, along with the rise of social games such as Roblox and Among Us, and new business models such as Fortnite’s “Battle Pass” subscriptions that offer more features. One of the engines of growth has been taken away. Virtual goods are added as the player progresses.
“Three years into the (pandemic), the biggest games are still as big as they were before, the big games are gone, and most other games have been scaled back,” Ball said. “Nearly all of the major studios were contending with the fact that they believed there would be millions more players and that audiences would come to try new games.”
The most popular games and franchises, such as Fortnite, soccer simulator EA Sports FC, and Microsoft’s Call of Duty, continue to be very lucrative for creators, but they aren’t growing at the same pace as they were a few years ago.
At the same time, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for new releases to separate players from their tried-and-true favorites, especially with new content being regularly added to blockbuster games throughout the year.
“Publishers are banking on the fact that as these games become evergreen, they’re better off betting bigger on proven (intellectual property) and things that will last longer with live services and content updates.” Osaki said.
One such timeless hit is GTA V, which has sold over 205 million copies to date, and its online multiplayer version continues to attract millions of players every month. This gives Take-Two a strong foundation from which to start a new game.
GTA Online’s launch was “pretty rocky” and initially failed due to high player demand, Zelnick recalled. “One of the things Rockstar has done over the last eight years is vastly improve the technical foundation of everything we do,” he said. “We don’t tend to face such challenges anymore.”
Unlike annual franchises like Call of Duty or EA Sports FC, GTA’s long gap between releases makes it a special event for gamers. “No one has done what GTA has done like GTA,” Lovell said.
However, it costs a huge amount of money, and the development costs, including post-launch content updates, are estimated to range from the low hundreds of millions of dollars to as much as $2 billion. “This may be the last hurray of that kind of business practice,” Lovell said. “Few people would be able to make that kind of bet on a property like that.
