This week Take-Two Interactive chief executive Strauss Zelnick told CNBC the thing every Grand Theft Auto VI fan wants to hear, which is, quite frankly, also the thing he was always going to say. His Rockstar Games division, he explained, understands that as big as the anticipation is, the job now is to exceed it. "I believe that we will," he added.
Promising to meet expectations is the single hardest promise anyone in gaming can make right now and Zelnick just talked about exceeding it, all the while making it about the one game where expectations are already the highest in gaming history. The anticipation around GTA 6 is the opposite of low. It is a decade-plus of waiting and delays, two trailers that each pulled hundreds of millions of views, and a fanbase that has quietly built the perfect game inside its own head.
When the bar is already scraping the ceiling, "exceed it" stops being a marketing line and becomes a genuinely difficult ask. A merely excellent game, the kind most studios would trade a limb for, could still land as a letdown purely because the fantasy was bigger than anything real could ever be.
To be fair, Zelnick was always more or less required to say this. Take-Two has tied its entire record forecast for the year to this game shipping and performing, so confidence about exceeding expectations is close to the only sentence available to him. A chief executive talking down his biggest launch three months out would be the actual news story.
Here is the part where Rockstar deserves its due. Take-Two's confidence isn't coming from nowhere. The studio's last two games are Grand Theft Auto V, which sits at a 97 on Metacritic and has sold more than 230 million copies across three console generations, and Red Dead Redemption 2, also a 97, at north of 87 million. Those are the bars Rockstar is measuring itself against, and it set every one of them itself. If any developer has earned the benefit of the doubt on clearing an impossible number, it is this one.
However, the part nobody in these interviews says out loud is that "expectations" is not one thing. Fans want a world that reinvents the open-world genre. Investors want Grand Theft Auto Online money, the kind that keeps flowing for a decade, and analysts, experts, and the rest of the video game industry want an $80 game that turns $80 into the new normal.
Nailing the investor version, aggressive monetization and all, is exactly the thing that would sour the fan version. Zelnick can promise to exceed expectations. He cannot promise to exceed all of them at once, and the fight already brewing over price suggests he knows it. He spent the same CNBC sit-down defending the $80 and $100 editions, leaning on GTA V's 13-year sales tail to justify them.
At this point, while Zelnick refuses to name a number for the GTA 6 pre-orders, the financial and commercial side is close to a lock, and we have already run the numbers on how fast the game clears break-even. The creative side, satire, memes, and all, which is where GTA 6 will really be measured against its predecessors, will have to wait until the game is in people's hands.
The first real test is not a quote on CNBC. It is Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look premiering on Netflix on August 27, when we finally get to see whether there is substance under all the confidence, or just more of it.
