GTA 6 Release Date May Be Sooner Than Fans Expect

After years of anticipation, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has gone live within the past day and has confirmed that the most-anticipated game ever is on track to release in 2025. Outside of this broad launch window, Rockstar Games itself hasn't given a further designator to indicate the season or quarter in 2025 when GTA VI might arrive. Based on what parent company Take-Two Interactive has said in the past, though, it does seem like the next Grand Theft Auto could be hitting store shelves in the earlier portion of the year rather than the latter half. 

Over the past year, Take-Two has started to provide guidance for its investors when it comes to its 2025 fiscal year, which is set to begin on April 1, 2024, and end on March 31, 2025. Staggeringly, Take-Two has said that it expects to bring in over $8 billion in revenue in this fiscal year, which is far higher than many of its previous earning periods. With this in mind, the belief is that GTA VI would be the catalyst that would bring in this windfall of cash for the company given how much the game will surely make once it releases. 

Assuming that GTA VI is the reason why Take-Two thinks it will haul in $8 billion in its 2025 fiscal year, it narrows the window in which the game would launch by a sizable margin. With Rockstar planning to release Grand Theft Auto VI in the calendar year of 2025, the only instance where this period overlaps with Take-Two's 2025 fiscal period would be between January and March of 2025. As such, it's possible that GTA VI will release at some point in this span of time, which means that the game is only about 12 to 15 months away. 

Obviously, it's worth stressing that things could absolutely change in the months ahead. With Rockstar's last major release, Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-world western title was delayed in two different instances. Rockstar originally planned for RDR2 to arrive in the Fall of 2017 but was subsequently delayed to the Spring of 2018 and then again to Fall of 2018, where it was finally released in October. As such, GTA VI could certainly suffer a similar fate, much to the dismay of many fans. 

Additionally, Take-Two could look to change its own guidance when it comes to financials in the coming months and may look to shift around its projections. Essentially, all of this is to say that GTA VI likely doesn't have a firm release date of any sort internally at Rockstar and Take-Two. Still, based on what we can gather for the time being, early 2025 definitely isn't out of the question when it comes to GTA VI getting into the hands of eager players. 

Regardless of when Grand Theft Auto VI does arrive, Rockstar has confirmed that it will be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. A PC version of the game has yet to be confirmed, but given how Rockstar has operated in the past, it seems that a launch for this platform will come about months or years after the console iterations.