Rockstar is "seeking perfection" for GTA 6 and will release it when it's "optimized creatively"
GTA 6 is scheduled to release sometime in 2025, and the sequel's publisher said during a financial results call that it's looking for perfection before the long-anticipated open-world game finally launches.
"We're seeking perfection, and when we feel we've optimized creatively, that's the time to release," Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, said to an investor asking how the publisher decides when release a game like GTA 6. Zelnick went on to assure investors that "we're all in this together," and that devs and executives both have financial incentives to ensure that development doesn't drag on forever.
"There is inherent tension, potentially, between getting something to market and creating perfection," Zelnick said, "but this company errs on the side of perfection."
In response to another investor, Zelnick said that compared to GTA 5, "our sense is that the anticipation [for GTA 6] is much higher - much, much higher. On the other hand, you know, 195 million units [of GTA 5 sold] to date is nothing to sneeze at. We stop well short of making predictions about how the title will do, but clearly anticipation is running very, very high."
By the time GTA 6 launches in 2025, there'll have been a 12-year gap between it and GTA 5, by far the longest stretch between major entries in the series. No wonder the sequel is so highly anticipated. As Take-Two notes in its financial report, the first GTA 6 trailer reached 93 million views in 24 hours - the biggest launch for anything besides music videos in YouTube history.
