“Look, Rockstar Games is the locus of information about, you know, where the titles go content and marketing, and generally, we have a pretty light touch when we talk about the label’s creative activities,” said Zelnick. “At the same time, I have every reason to believe we’ll continue to support GTA Online. There’s a great community that loves it, that stays engaged. And again in this quarter, Rockstar has shown that when you deliver great additional content, despite how long [GTA Online] has been at market, people show up.”

Zelnick had shared similar sentiments about GTA Online back in February 2025, when he spoke about Take-Two Interactive’s commitment to long-running multiplayer games. He had brought up titles like 2012’s NBA 2K Online, which continued to see support even after the release of its sequel five years later.

“I’m going to speak theoretically only because I’m not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn’t been made,” said Zelnick at the time. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles. As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I’m not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017. If I’m not mistaken. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they’re alive and we have this massive audience.”

“So we’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”

While neither Rockstar Games nor Take-Two Interactive have confirmed this yet, Grand Theft Auto 6 will also likely end up getting its own equivalent to GTA Online. While both will likely see continued development and support in the short term, the newer iteration of GTA Online will probably see more and more players jump into it to make use of the latest release’s features. In the long term, once enough players have migrated, GTA Online will most probably get shut down.

It is also worth noting that, while some of Take-Two Interactive’s releases have seen long-term support, others haven’t been so lucky. A key example of this is the WWE 2K franchise, with a new release often causing all online components of older entries to get shut down. WWE 2K24 is the latest example of this, with it being taken down from digital stores as of February 2.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is being developed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and will be coming out on November 19 after having seen several delays. More delays might be unlikely, with marketing plans for the release being on track to kick off this Summer, according to Zelnick.

On Xbox? Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5, Roblox and Minecraft. What’s even crazier is that these are the same as 2024’s most-played titles on both platforms, though Call of Duty on Xbox fell from first to second place year-over-year.

However, despite critics and fans dragging last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 for its horrendous campaign, and Battlefield 6 emerging as the best-selling premium title, the brand still has some pull. Of course, there’s also the free-to-play component, Call of Duty: Warzone, which remains a significant presence. The same goes for Grand Theft Auto Online, although even standalone, it isn’t free.

Then again, Grand Theft Auto 5 has shipped over 220 million units and is available on three different console generations, so its popularity seems a given. Which only makes you wonder just how much more successful Grand Theft Auto 6 will be, even if it doesn’t ship with its own multiplayer mode at launch. It’s slated for launch on November 19th after two big delays.

Vogel – whose credits include EverQuest, Star Wars: Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and New World – was asked by WCCF Tech about MMOs and their retention rate in the West. “Yes, I believe a large audience is waiting for the right MMORPG to emerge. Consider the millions of players who have played and continue to play World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Fallout 76, and others.

“The problem is that no publisher is willing to invest the money and take the risk at this time. My instinct tells me that the next major MMORPG will likely come from Asia and/or Europe. If what I have been hearing about GTA 6’s features and gameplay is true, it could evolve into an MMORPG, as many of its planned features are typically found in MMORPGs.”

Again, this is likely referring to the GTA Online portion of the game rather than its story mode (which Rockstar has kept separate in GTA 5). What those “planned features” could be is the real question. After all, you can already customize living spaces and properties, invite friends over, roam the world together, and even partake in multi-stage heists.

With Grand Theft Auto 6 launching on November 19th, 2026 (assuming there’s not another delay), we may find out in the first half of next year.

According to the report, there have been a total of 71 million games sold in 2025 across PC and consoles in Europe, which marks a 6 percent drop over the same period from 2024. This data accounts for sales having taken place up to July 28. Of the 71 million game sales, 52 million were digital copies, while 19.7 million were physical copies. These are 3 percent and 9 percent reductions over the previous year, and around 74 percent of games sold this year in Europe have been digital, which, when it comes to percentages, is a 2 percent rise from 2024.

The best-selling game in Europe in 2025 has been EA Sports FC 25. The title was released back in 2024, and taking it into account, Assassin’s Creed Shadows currently sits in the number 2 spot for game sales overall in Europe across PC and consoles. The top 20 sales chart, which you can check out below, also include other games released this year, including The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, Elden Ring: Nightreign, and Nintendo Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World. It is worth noting that digital sales data for Nintendo games hasn’t been revealed.

The data, coming from official European charts company GSD, also interestingly omits Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It was noted as being missing because publisher Kepler Interactive hasn’t shared sales data for the game with GSD. An analyst from GSD, Sam Naji, also revealed some details about how game spending has changed for PC and consoles over the year.

In his analysis, Naji said that the first 19 weeks of 2025 saw spending drop by 2 percent compared to 2024, down to €1.33 billion, while the number of copies sold dropped by 9 percent. He attributed this to the average price of games having gone up by around 8 percent, with gamers spending an average of €29 per game, when compared to 2024’s average of €27 per game. He also noted that digital spending had gone up by 8 percent compared to a 6 percent drop in number of units sold, attributing it to a 15 percent rise in average price for digital games – €22 to €25 per game.

Best Selling Games in Europe for 2025 Across PC and Consoles:

1. EA Sports FC 25 (EA)
2. Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Ubisoft)
3. Grand Theft Auto 5 (Rockstar)
4. Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar)
5. Hogwarts Legacy (Warner Bros)
6. Split Fiction (EA)
7. Monster Hunter Wilds (Capcom)
8. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Activision Blizzard)
9. Mario Kart World (Nintendo)
10. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (Plaion)
11. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Bethesda)
12. Star Wars Battlefront 2 (EA)
13. Elden Ring: Nightreign (Bandai Namco)
14. It Takes Two (EA)
15. Grand Theft Auto Online (Rockstar)
16. NBA 2K25 (2K Games)
17. F1 25 (EA)
18. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege (Ubisoft)
19. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe (Nintendo)
20. Battlefield 1 (EA)

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.

Since GTA Online differentiates between PC players on the regular edition of GTA 5 and the more recent Enhanced Edition release, PC Game Pass players have access to both versions of the game so that they can hop online with their friends without worrying about version mismatch errors.

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced Edition was released as a free update to PC players back in March. On launch, however, the game was met with mixed reviews from its players. Even now, GTA 5 Enhanced Edition has a user review aggregate of Mixed on Steam, featuring more than 33,000 user reviews.

While players have been quite happy with the visual and performance upgrades brought in by the Enhanced Edition release, many have complained about technical issues, including HDR not being supported in some cases. More recent reviews have complained about GTA Online lobbies feeling much emptier than they used to, as well as the heavy-handed implementation of microtransactions.

The enhancements brought in to the PC version of GTA 5 include the graphical upgrades we first saw with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game. The upgrade also brought with it a host of new vehicles, along with new activities to take on like the Wildlife Photography Challenge.

GTA 5 Enhanced Edition is also hoping to bolster the player base for GTA Online by giving newer players a gentler learning curve by letting them have GTA$4,000,000 to start out with.

For more details about Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced Edition, check out our thoughts about why it offers little more than a relatively decent visual upgrade, with its new content not quite feeling up to par with the rest of the game.

Since its release back in 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 has been incredibly successful for developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive. Back in February, Take-Two revealed during its quarterly earnings report that more than 210 million copies of GTA 5 have been sold worldwide. This brings up cumulative sales for the GTA franchise as a whole up to more than 440 million units.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has also been doing quite well. While not as successful in terms of copies sold as GTA 5, the game still managed to sell more than 70 million copies worldwide.

In the meantime, Rockstar is currently developing Grand Theft Auto 6. While no details about the game have been revealed so far, many developers are holding their breath since it will likely be a massive launch that has far-reaching effects on the gaming industry. The game is being developed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. There has been no word of a PC release so far.

Right off the bat, PC players will gain access to new vehicles at Hao’s Special Works with the option to upgrade certain cars. They can also partake in the Wildlife Photography Challenge to photograph animals in San Andreas, avail of GTA+ and manage their GTA Online empire via the Career Progress page.

The update will also provide a good entry point for new players courtesy of the revamped Landing Page and GTA$4,000,000 for kickstarting their career of choice.

Stay tuned for more details on Grand Theft Auto 5’s PC update in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out our review of the PS5 version.

While he didn’t offer specific details, Zelnick spoke about the publisher’s willingness to support its older titles, as long as there is still interest in the player base. As an example, Zelnick pointed to NBA 2K Online – a China-exclusive online game launched back in 2012 – which was followed up by the 2017 launch of NBA 2K Online 2. The servers for both titles are still live.

“I’m going to speak theoretically only because I’m not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn’t been made,” Zelnick said to IGN. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles. As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I’m not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017. If I’m not mistaken. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they’re alive and we have this massive audience.”

“So we’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”

While Zelnick has a point in that particular instance, publisher Take-Two has also shown a willingness to shut down the servers for some of its older titles in order to promote newer releases in the franchise. A prime example of this would be this year’s closure of the WWE 2K23 servers, which brought an end to multiplayer as well as community creations. This was done in order to get players that want to focus on multiplayer to move to the more recent WWE 2K24, or wait for the upcoming WWE 2K25.

When it comes to GTA Online itself, things could go either way. Both the publisher, as well as developer Rockstar Games have invested quite a bit of time and money into the game to add tonnes of content over the years. Interestingly, Red Dead Online is also still live, despite never reaching the heights of popularity that its GTA cousin did.

A recent report has indicated that GTA 6 would have some sort of emphasis on user-generated content. What this means for the title, and whether we’ll see the user-generated content also show up in the follow-up to GTA Online, is currently unknown. Developer Rockstar has seemingly been in talks with the companies behind Fortnite and Roblox, both of which have quite a bit of support for user-generated content.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is slated for release some time in Fall this year. The game is currently in development for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. There has been no solid announcement yet of a potential PC release of the game. Recent rumours, however, have indicated that we might see the open-world title come to PC in early 2026.

If there is one issue that more than a few have raised in pretty much any and all discussions related to Rockstar, it’s that the frequency with which the developer has put out games has gone down drastically, which is something that’s become truer with time. Consider the fact, for instance, that by the time Grand Theft Auto 6 releases next fall, it will have been seven years since Red Dead Redemption 2 was released, which itself came out a whole five years after Grand Theft Auto 5. Between 2013 and 2025, over the course of a dozen years, Rockstar will have put out just three main titles, and that’s assuming that Grand Theft Auto 6 does not get delayed.

Compare this to the company’s output in previous years. During the Xbox 360 years, for instance, we saw Grand Theft Auto 4, its many expansions, Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, L.A. Noire, and Max Payne 3. In addition to all of these console titles, the company also put out games such as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty Stories, and others on the side. That’s an insane amount of games over the course of less than a decade, and the overwhelming majority of those games were at least really damn good, if not outright stellar.

Looking at that list of games also sheds light on the fact that Rockstar has heavily trimmed down its portfolio. Where previously the company was putting out al manner of different games in different genres and on different platforms, now, if Rockstar isn’t making Grand Theft Auto, it’s making Red Dead Redemption, and it’s only doing so on the most premium of machines. Not only has the company heavily cut down on the number of games it’s putting out, it’s also leaned down its output to only focus on the biggest of the big hitters, variety and all be damned.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons for why that has happened. The first that instantly jumps to mind is Grand Theft Auto Online. The online component started out as little more than a multiplayer addendum to GTA 5, but over the years, it turned into a juggernaut without parallel. Thanks to GTA Online, GTA 5 has surpassed a whopping 200 million units sold, and continues to rake in just a stupid amount of money for Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive through microtransactions. Even for a historically successful and influential company like Rockstar, GTA Online has brought unprecedented success.

Given the sort of money that it rakes in, then, it’s no surprise that so much of Rockstar has been focused on GTA Online. Is it single handedly responsible for Rockstar no longer working on smaller, more experimental games? Maybe not- but there’s no doubt that Rockstar would not want to take people working on GTA Online off the game so that they could work on, say, a Midnight Club or a handheld game instead. On top of that, it’s also heavily responsible for the complete and total lack of single player DLC put out by Rockstar over the last decade or so. Neither GTA 5 nor Red Dead Redemption 2 got single player expansions, even though both of their predecessors got incredible ones, and it’s fair to say that the work that Rockstar was doing on both of their online components had a significant role to play in that (even though Red Dead 2’s online wasn’t nearly as successful as GTA Online continues to be even now).

But of course, GTA Online is not the only reason for the significant decrease in frequency of Rockstar releases. If you’ve been paying attention to the games industry in recent years, you know that development costs and timelines have ballooned to a ridiculous degree. Even a regular AAA game in today’s day and age requires anywhere between 4-6 years to develop on average. Consider, however, the size, scale, ridiculous attention to detail, and level of quality that a flagship Rockstar game boasts, and even the average AAA development timeline starts looking inadequate.

Rockstar is, admittedly, a much larger company even than some of the largest AAA studios around. With multiple thousands of employees, not to mention the kind of financial backing that few other studios in the industry can match, Rockstar can throw more resources at its games and over a longer period of time than even some of the most prominent publishers out there. Even with that, however, it’s not surprising that games like Grand Theft Auto 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are taking as long as they are to make, because that level of fidelity and quality across that ridiculous scale simply cannot be achieved any other way. That obviously has a human cost, too, and Rockstar has, of course, attracted controversy over issues related to crunch and overworked employees more than a few times over the years- though thankfully, that’s an area where Rockstar has reportedly taken steps to make legitimate improvements.

This, of course, is not in Rockstar’s control. If it is to make the sort of industry-shaking Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto titles that it wants to make, Rockstar is going to need a bucketload of money and several years to make them- and let’s face it, at this point, anything coming from Rockstar that doesn’t touch a certain level of quality is going to be met with a lot of pushback and resistance from the company’s fanbase.

Ultimately, Rockstar’s decisions are going to be driven primarily by what it deems to be the best use of its ample resources. Would we love to see the game easing up on fixation with Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption to maybe widen its portfolio again and also put out other titles in addition to its flagship release? Obviously we would, but there’s also no denying that doing so would require resources being diverted away from things that have made a ridiculous amount of money- which means it’s extremely unlikely that Rockstar is going to make that decision.

The constant revenue that GTA Online brings in allows Rockstar to take the time that it takes with its games, which is an incredibly unique position for the studio to be in, and though a hypothetical scenario where that revenue stream dries up would necessitate a rethinking of that strategy, for that revenue stream to dry up, Grand Theft Auto 6 and its online component would have to do poorly. And as things stand right now, it’s fair to say that that looks quite unlikely.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Rockstar’s 2018 open-world title has sold over 65 million units, up from nearly 64 million lifetime sales at the end of the previous quarter. Though support has ended for Red Dead Online, the title’s multiplayer component, Take-Two said it “continued to engage its audience” with free outfits based on content creators and monthly bonuses.

Net bookings for the quarter reached $1.22, which is in line with Take-Two’s previous guidance, with NBA 2K24 and the Grand Theft Auto series noted to be the largest contributors. However, recurrent consumer spending (constituting 83 percent of the net bookings) is down, including in Grand Theft Auto Online and NBA 2K. Grand Theft Auto 6 didn’t get any updates, save for reiterating the Fall 2025 release window.