GTA 6 Has to Carry Take-Two’s $8 Billion Year: How the Bet Compares With GTA V and RDR2

Take-Two expects $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, a company record. On August 7, CEO Strauss Zelnick tied that number directly to “the November 19th launch of Grand Theft Auto VI.”

The year before, the whole company booked $6.72 billion in net bookings (Official, Take-Two FY26 results). So one game, sold for about four and a half months of the fiscal year, has to carry most of a $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion jump. That’s the bet.

Take-Two’s FY27 Guidance Is $8.0 Billion to $8.2 Billion

The number first appeared with Take-Two’s fiscal 2026 results in May. CFO Lainie Goldstein told analysts: “We project net bookings to range from $8 billion to $8.2 billion” (Official, earnings call). In the August 7 first-quarter release, Zelnick reiterated it word for word, citing “excitement around the November 19th launch of Grand Theft Auto VI.” The same release guides GAAP revenue to $7.9 billion to $8.1 billion (Official).

For scale: Take-Two’s 10-K puts FY26 net bookings at $6.721 billion, up 19% on the year before (Official). Hitting the guidance means growing another 19% to 22%. Take-Two also owns NBA 2K, Zynga’s mobile games and GTA Online, which carry the rest of the year the way they always do. The first quarter came in at $1.39 billion, down 3%, and 84% of it was recurrent spending (Official). Nothing in the base business explains a billion-dollar jump. One thing does.

A note on the word: net bookings is Take-Two’s operating metric, roughly what it sold in the period, digital or physical, before accounting spreads revenue out over time. It’s the number Wall Street watches.

GTA V Made $1 Billion in Three Days. RDR2 Made $725 Million.

On September 20, 2013, Take-Two announced GTA V had reached “worldwide retail sales of more than $1 billion during its first three days on sale, according to Company estimates,” the fastest any entertainment property had hit that mark (Official). It had passed $800 million on day one.

Five years later, Red Dead Redemption 2 posted “entertainment’s biggest opening weekend of all time,” with three-day sales topping $725 million (Official, Take-Two release). GTA V still holds the faster billion.

The company-level effect was enormous both times. Take-Two’s fiscal 2014 revenue roughly doubled to about $2.35 billion on GTA V, and fiscal 2019 net bookings grew 47% to a then-record $2.93 billion on RDR2 (Reported, from Take-Two’s results as quoted at the time). Today’s guidance is more than three times the GTA V year, for a much bigger company.

Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring Set the Recent Bar

The modern launches GTA 6 gets measured against, all from their publishers:

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022): more than $800 million in sell-through in three days, $1 billion in ten (Official, Activision).
• Hogwarts Legacy (2023): more than 12 million units and $850 million in its first two weeks (Official, Warner Bros. Games).
• Elden Ring (2022): over 12 million copies shipped in under three weeks (Official, Bandai Namco).

Not one of them beat GTA V’s three-day billion from 2013, on PS3 and Xbox 360, at a $60 price. Keep that in mind when a forecast for GTA 6 sounds wild. The last one was.

What Analysts Expect GTA 6 to Sell

Everything in this section is Estimate. Take-Two does not publish a sales projection for a single game.

• Newzoo, extrapolating pre-order behavior: $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion in week-one revenue (via Forbes, July; Newzoo analyst write-up).
• Sensor Tower: more than 6 million pre-orders and close to $600 million by 13 October (GameSpot); 4.08 million by 20 July (Sensor Tower); 4.3 million, 77% on PlayStation, in mid-August (GamesIndustry.biz).
• Estimate Alinea Analytics: around 30 million sold in the first week, building to 50 million into 2027.
• Aldora: 38 million copies and just over $3 billion in the first 12 months. Ampere: 30 to 35 million by the end of the year.
• Estimate Enders Analysis, its “blow out” scenario: more than 50 million in year one, possibly near 60 million.

The spread is the story. The low end is a record. The high end is a record that embarrasses the previous record. And the price of entry matters: GTA 6 doesn’t cost the same everywhere, which our price by country guide breaks down.

GTA 6’s Budget Is Unpublished, but Take-Two Admits It Was Expensive

Asked about cost, Zelnick declined to give a figure and said only that “it was expensive” (Reported, IGN). Business Insider estimated Take-Two had spent $1 billion to $1.5 billion so far (Reported). On 14 October Rockstar told Bloomberg the game did not cost more than $1.5 billion, without giving a figure (Reported, GameSpot). Other outside figures run higher, up to $2 billion and beyond (Estimate).

The filings give a frame, not an answer. Take-Two’s balance sheet carried about $2.28 billion of capitalized software development costs and licenses (non-current) at March 31, 2026, across every game it’s making, not just GTA 6 (Official). That excludes marketing. Treat any single-title budget you read as an estimate.

Take-Two’s Filings Spell Out the Risk

The 10-K is blunt. Grand Theft Auto and a few other titles “are hit products and have historically accounted for a substantial portion of our revenue,” and GTA products alone were 12.4% of FY26 net revenue, with no new mainline game that year (Official). Every quarterly release lists “the timely release and significant market acceptance of our games” and “our dependence on our NBA 2K and Grand Theft Auto products” among the risks.

That timing risk isn’t hypothetical. GTA 6 was first announced for 2025 and moved, then moved again to November 19, 2026. The FY27 outlook explicitly assumes “the timely delivery of the titles included in this financial outlook” (Official). Another slip past March 31 would move the record year, not just the game.

Official Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1, Rockstar Games’ official YouTube upload.

What We Still Don’t Know

• How much of the $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion Take-Two expects from GTA 6 alone.
• The real development cost.
• Launch-week sales. Take-Two usually announces a record when it has one.
• When a PC version lands, and how much of the bet it covers.

Our earnings tracker follows each Take-Two report. The next one that matters comes after November 19, when ten years of waiting finally becomes a number.

Related: What’s confirmed · GTA 6 PC · System requirements · Pre-order guide · Editions