Take-Two Interactive reported earnings ten days before the biggest launch in its history, so every word out of CEO Strauss Zelnick this week was always going to lead to more questions and discussions surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI. To that end, he sat for three interviews in a single day, with Bloomberg, GamesIndustry.biz and IGN, and between them he covered everything from pre-orders, guidance, the next decade of the series and the question everyone still asks, whether the game could slip one more time.
To sum it all up, Zelnick is optimistic and careful in equal measure. "I'm looking forward to the launch," he told IGN, which for a man ten days from shipping the biggest game of the generation counts as restraint.
Start with the money, since that is what the earnings were about. Pre-orders for GTA VI are running "far in excess" of expectations, with Sensor Tower putting them near 8 million, yet Take-Two held its full-year guidance at $8 billion to $8.2 billion rather than chase the higher figure analysts wanted. "We chose not to change our guidance because we're just ten days away from release," Zelnick told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.
The same gravity dented one of Take-Two's own games. NBA 2K27 missed its sales target for the year despite selling 4 million copies, one of the highest ever for the annual franchise. Zelnick told both Bloomberg and IGN that GTA VI pulled some buyers away. "If your lunch is going to be eaten, I'd rather be the one eating it," he said, treating the cannibalization as a win since the money stays in the house.
On the game itself, Zelnick was blunt about the one fear fans keep raising. "It's not going to be delayed again," he told IGN, pushing back on the delay talk we have tracked through its development. He went further on the future, saying the "nature and velocity" of Rockstar Games' output "will look dramatically different over the next decade," a hint that the wait between GTA VI and whatever follows may not be another eight years.
He also touched the live game. Zelnick said Take-Two will "keep supporting" Grand Theft Auto Online, calling it "resilient" even with the sequel arriving. He promised that the company is "very focused" on a smooth launch, with the extensive pre-load meant to ease the crush. On the threat of AI-cloned games and PS5 jailbreaks pushing GTA VI onto PC early, he called it "a creative matter" rather than a financial one, adding a pointed line about AI firms, that "it seems ironic... to stomp on someone else's IP and hope that yours is protected."
In a nutshell, what Zelnick said this week about GTA VI reflects optimism tempered by caution. The pre-orders and the dented NBA 2K27 numbers are doing the talking for him. He spent the week telling everyone the same thing in different words, that the real story starts the moment the game is out.
The good news is that we won't have to wait too long. GTA VI launches on November 19 with pre-loads scheduled for November 10 followed by a festival planned by Rockstar itself after the real-life NBA team, Miami Heat, dons a fictional Vice City jersey in front of a hometown crowd that has seen the real-life inspiration for Leonida transformed into Vice City for most of the past two months.
