Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has hailed PC gaming’s “increasing share of the market”, in what you could optimistically interpret as the prelude to a GTA 6 PC release date announcement, and less optimistically, as a simple reassurance to investors who are fretting about the decline of console game sales.
The new Grand Theft Auto is slated to release on Xbox and PlayStation in fall 2025. As per Rockstar Games tradition, the PC release remains TBA. For context, GTA 5 released on PC around 18 months after hitting Xbox 360 and PS3, while GTA 4 took an extra eight months or so, and Red Dead Redemption 2 a year.
This strategy of releasing PC versions late persists despite Zelnick’s comment in a recent interview with Ian Games that the PC version of a multiplatform game can account for over 40% of overall sales. “We have seen PC become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that trend continue,” he told the site. “Of course, there will be a new console generation.”
Here is some slapdash background on the console biz, which is undergoing something of an evolutionary slow period. Only Nintendo – who basically operate their own games industry nested matryoshka doll-style inside the regular games industry – have announced their next big piece of hardware. We’ve yet to hear about PS6 and whatever Microsoft call the Nextbox, so there’s a bit of a gap on the industry earnings forecast. In the meantime, the existing consoles are slowly petrifying like forgotten dragons, shifting fewer and fewer units between them.
Zelnick reckons the release of GTA 6 might help with flagging console sales, even in a year when the US presidency is picking lots of fights with trading partners. And if it doesn’t, hey, there’s always the apparently thriving PC market.
“When you have a big title in the market and we have many of them coming, historically that has sold consoles,” he told IGN. “And I think that will happen this year. I don’t think tariffs are going to be our friend, but I think there will be a meaningful uptick in console sales in calendar 25 because of the release schedule, not just coming from us, but coming from others. So I’m not concerned about that [console sales falling]. I think the trend that you’d want to focus on is this increasing share of the market that is reflected in PC.”
OK, so, once more with feeling: GTA 6 PC release date when? Being a bear of little brain, I can’t really explain Rockstar’s tendency to show up late on PC, but I imagine it’s not a resource question, given that Rockstar have thousands of developers and still earn megabucks from GTA 5 re-releases and GTA Online. The explanation that makes most sense to me is simply that shipping on PC “late” is an excuse to double-dip – max out the console sales initially, then polish up the tech for re-release on more capable PCs and, perhaps, the next generation of consoles.