GTA V was released nearly 8 years ago (the anniversary will be in September), but is still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars every year for Take-Two Interactive. Not to mention billions.
After years of great success, Take-Two Interactive has admitted that it expected that GTA V lost popularity in the long run, as it would naturally be. It hasn’t actually happened yet.
In fact, seven years after its release, the game is still hitting record levels of earnings. The game, as we reported a few days ago, has reached 145 million copies sold, with GTA V alone accounting for 42% of the total sales of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
Both GTA V and GTA Online helped Take-Two hit a record $ 3.37 billion in net revenues in fiscal year 2021, and it’s worth remembering that this trend could continue, or even improve, with the third release for GTA V console on PS5 and Xbox Series X | S coming in November.
But exactly, when does Take-Two still make money from GTA 5 today? The answer is astounding, and it makes us understand why in 2021, almost 8 years after the game’s launch, we still haven’t officially heard of GTA 6.
In a recent report, Take-Two confirms that the GTA franchise generated 29.2% of total revenue for the financial year 2021, which translates to $ 984.9 million to be precise. We round up to one billion dollarsnot to be too picky. A billion dollars in revenue from a game that has been around for nearly 8 years.
To make a comparison with another big name in the industry, the Call of Duty franchise earned over $ 3 billion in revenue in the past financial year. But let’s talk about a series, that of Activision, which churns out a new chapter every year, and which can also count on the continuous flow of users between the free to play COD Warzone and COD Mobile.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, however, expects the game’s earnings to start to slow, even considering the game’s re-release later this year on next-generation consoles.
To be fair, in light of the numbers you just read, we wouldn’t be surprised if Zelnick was once again proven wrong – which we believe the company boss wouldn’t mind.
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