With Grand Theft Auto 5 having come out all the way back in 2013, and the next mainline release in the franchise coming 13 years later on May 26, 2026, the wait for a new GTA game by Rockstar Games has been quite a lengthy one. However, CEO of publisher Take-Two Interactive – Strauss Zelnick – doesn’t see it that way. In a conversation with The Game Business, Zelnick claimed that Rockstar has technically been putting out new GTA content “a couple of times a year”.
According to Zelnick, this comes from the fact that, for more than a decade now, Rockstar’s main contribution to the Grand Theft Auto franchise has been through the release of updates for GTA Online. He compares this to a time before an Internet connection was ubiquitous, and a game would simply be released before the studio would move on to its next project.
“Remember, back in the good old days, or the bad old days depending how you look at it,” said Zelnick. “We would work on a title, release the title, hope for the best, and then make another title. Now we have the opportunity for consumers to engage on an on-going basis with our hits. Be that through downloadable add-on content, or through multiplayer versions of those games.”
In more modern times, Zelnick compared the amount of content that has been added to GTA Online to being equivalent to being like full releases in the past. “In the case of Grand Theft Auto, we have Grand Theft Auto Online, and Rockstar has been supplying content to Grand Theft Auto Online, some of which is so robust that if you go back 15 years, it would have counted as a standalone title,” he said.
“One could really argue that Rockstar has been putting out a new Grand Theft Auto release a couple of times a year. Same thing holds true for Red Dead Online, which has been on-going. And in the most recent quarter, Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online has exceeded expectations.”
He also brings up the fact that similar online components available in games like the NBA 2K or the WWE 2K franchises have extended the time players spend with these games up from just a few months “to basically 12 months.”
“Our strategy is when we give consumers a hit, they would like to stay engaged,” explained Zelnick. “And that requires our teams to create more content quite properly, to support that content and to market that content. The business has become a worldwide, on-going business. I would argue that Rockstar is delivering to its consumer base daily, and it has been doing that for quite some time, basically since 2014.”
Since the release of GTA 5, the only major title released by Rockstar Games has been 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. However, since then, the studio has been working on Grand Theft Auto 6, and work on the highly-anticipated open world game began “in earnest” in 2020. There have also been other releases in the GTA franchise in the time between GTA 5 and now, including Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which included GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is in development for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
