GTA 6's release date will come after April 2025, suggests Ubisoft's CEO
Take-Two financials suggest otherwise
It's time to play everybody's favourite game - no, not GTA 6, but the GTA 6 Release Date Quiz. Who's stepping up to the podium this time? Why, it's Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, who offered thoughts on the matter in a recent investor Q&A. Fingers on the buzzers, everybody!
GTA 6 will launch in 2025, according to the first trailer, which has now been subject to more analysis and speculation than most archaeological relics. Learning GTA 6's release date probably counts as an actual fundable R&D objective at some videogame publishers, for the same reason that learning the exact cadence of avalanches is of major interest to ski resorts. But Guillemot says he isn't worried about competition with Rockstar on the whole.
"What we've seen in the past is that each time there's a big release like GTA, there are more and more people coming back to the industry, and that helps other games to sell as well," he told investors on the call. "We see it for sure." A rising tide lifts all boats, then.
"We look at this and we are really organizing things around the launch of that game, which we do not know exactly when it is going to happen," Guillemot went on. "We consider it will be closer to our financial year '26 than our financial year '25. But what we've seen is that generally it's actually positive for the market, and we did a good launch with the launch of GTA 5 first launch and GTA 5 online game, each time we were able to generate really good revenue and profit on the games we launched."
As IGN clarifies, this means that Guillemot thinks GTA 6 won't show up until at least April 2025. But what's this? GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive are chuckling and shaking their heads. In an earnings call this week (via Variety), the company reaffirmed a previous $8 billion revenue forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2025.
That's quite the step up from Take-Two's fiscal 2024 earnings forecast of between $5.25 and $5.3 billion. A GTA 6 launch at the very start of 2025 would be one way to fill the gap, but alas, in the Take-Two Interactive call, CEO Strauss Zelnick resisted pressure to get specific, commenting only that "we're seeking perfection and when we've optimized, that's the time to release". Perhaps they'll push it back so they can fit in more Florida Men.