GTA 6 predicted to make over $1,000,000,000 in pre-orders alone say analysts

GTA 6 is bound to make money, but how much money? (Rockstar)

Analysts are expecting GTA 6 to be a massive money maker when it launches, but it may not be a perfect solution to the games industry’s woes.

Assuming it isn’t delayed, GTA 6 will undoubtedly be the most important video game release of 2025. It’s such a big deal that other publishers are reportedly refraining from announcing autumn 2025 release dates for their games to avoid directly competing with it.

Surprisingly, 2024 saw no updates on GTA 6’s progress, with none of the fan theories of when a second trailer would drop proving accurate. As such, expectations are high for developer Rockstar to share something later this year.

While there’s no telling when that will happen, one thing you can predict is that GTA 6 will make a lot of money when it comes out. In fact, analysts are predicting it will manage to shatter the records set by GTA 5 when it launched in 2013.

How much money will GTA 6 make?

Speaking with The Financial Times, market research firm DFC Intelligence predicts that GTA 6 will make $1 billion just in pre-orders. That’s a feat not even GTA 5 managed, with it meeting the same threshold three days after its release.

DFC Intelligence adds that it then expects GTA 6 to generate $3.2 billion in revenue in its first 12 months on the market. Not only is this twice as much as GTA 5 made in the same timeframe, but it’s also far more than any movie that came out in 2024. For comparison’s sake, the highest grossing movie last year was Inside Out 2 at almost $1.7 billion at the box office.

This would easily make GTA 6 one of the biggest launches in all of entertainment, not just video games. Yoshio Osaki, chief executive of IDG Consulting, even says as much, adding, ‘The pent-up demand is greater than anything we’ve seen before.’

While GTA 5 has made more than $8.5 billion in revenue in its entire lifetime, it’s entirely possible GTA 6 could exceed that if these predictions prove accurate. Especially if Rockstar keeps player engagement up with a successor to the GTA Online multiplayer mode.

GTA 6’s success is also expected to be a net positive for the entire games industry since it will make video games in general more of a mainstream topic purely through association.

However, not everyone is convinced GTA 6 will automatically trigger a surge of growth within the industry. Ampere Analysis’ forecasts predict consumer spending on games will only go up by 2.2 percent to $195 billion.

That may sound like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the substantial growth the industry enjoyed from 2015 to 2021, where spending shot up from $95 billion to $191 billion.

Obviously, the Covid-19 induced lockdown played a part in that too and the last few years have demonstrated that executives expected that growth to continue. It’s what emboldened companies into taking on too many new staff and/or buying out studios, and eventually led to the rampant lay-offs that dominated 2023 and 2024.

‘We’ve grown so well in the last 25 years that it feels like none of us knows how to work in a non-growing industry,’ says game designer and consultant Nicholas Lovell. ‘There is no funding and the market is oversaturated [with new games].’

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive who also oversaw his own share of layoffs, admitted to The Financial Times, ‘We too got a little bit ahead of ourselves in terms of growth expectations.’

However, he still says he was ‘a bit surprised’ when consumer spending on games began to dwindle post-pandemic. But he’s confident that the launch of GTA 6 will spark renewed interest in gaming.

‘You’re seeing more consumer demand broadly. And the [games] industry, frankly led by us, has an amazing release schedule coming in 2025 and beyond,’ says Zelnick. ‘A hit coming from one company tends to benefit the entire industry.’