Take-Two's latest earnings show a soft quarter before the storm, but the company is standing by its $8 billion-plus forecast on the back of GTA 6 pre-orders, and Bloomberg says GTA 6 even dragged down NBA 2K27.
Original article
Ten days out, Take-Two is done being coy about Grand Theft Auto VI. In its fiscal second quarter results released Monday afternoon, CEO Strauss Zelnick said: “The launch of Grand Theft Auto VI is ten days away and, with pre-orders continuing to reach unprecedented levels, we expect to deliver an historic year for our company.”
Update 4:35 PM ET: Take-Two went even further in its earnings presentation. As first spotted by The Verge, the deck says GTA 6 pre-orders are tracking “far above” the company’s initial expectations, and adds: “we know that the numbers will speak for themselves soon enough.” That’s Take-Two telling investors, in writing, that it already beat its own forecast before the game is even out.
Update 4:50 PM ET: Zelnick repeated the point in interviews after the results. He told Variety that GTA 6 presales are “running far in excess of our expectations,” then added, “That’s a good thing. That said, we never claim success before it’s earned.” He also promised Take-Two will “certainly be giving more information about how ‘GTA 6’ performs post-launch.” Asked about GTA 6 on PC or Switch 2, Zelnick said “information always comes from our labels,” leaving any announcement to Rockstar. PC players, that’s not a no.
GTA Online players got good news too. Speaking to IGN, Zelnick said Rockstar will keep the current game going: “We intend to keep supporting GTA Online and it has been very successful. It’s been very resilient. It has continued to grow over the years, so we feel very good about it.” And the bar GTA 6 is chasing just got higher. Per Insider Gaming, Take-Two’s latest figures put GTA 5 at roughly 235 million copies sold as of September 30, 2026, with the Grand Theft Auto franchise at nearly 480 million.
Update 7:40 PM ET: And for everyone already asking about GTA 7, Zelnick hinted the next wait won’t look like this one. Asked by IGN whether future GTA games will take as long, he said: “We do think that the nature and velocity of the content we’ll see from our iconic franchises, including GTA, will look dramatically different over the next decade.” He tied that to releasing top quality games, “reaching our players in new ways and in new places” and keeping players engaged after launch. That follows a Bloomberg report in which senior Rockstar staff said future GTA games shouldn’t take as long to make, as Insider Gaming noted. It’s not a date or a promise, but “including GTA” is about as direct as Take-Two gets.
Update 8:25 PM ET: The biggest line from the analyst call is the simplest one: GTA 6 is done. Take-Two’s executives told analysts that Rockstar has completed development, according to call recaps from GamesBeat and GTAVice, which works from Investing.com’s transcript. In other words, the game has gone gold, Rockstar’s focus now is a clean technical launch, and anyone still bracing for a third delay can relax. Zelnick was also asked about the reported GTA 6 budget of no more than $1.5 billion. He pointed out that Take-Two has never disclosed the budget, and said a figure described as a ceiling shouldn’t be read as what was actually spent, noting the real number could be a lot lower. He did admit Take-Two has invested heavily and hopes it pays off. On PC, he again declined to talk about future platforms, though he said that in general modern PCs aren’t materially different from consoles in what they can do. GTA 6 still launches on two consoles first, and Xbox Series X|S is one of them.
That word, unprecedented, is doing a lot of work coming from the company that sold GTA V. Take-Two didn’t give a pre-order number, but it backed the claim with money. It reiterated its full-year forecast of $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, and guided $3.35 billion to $3.5 billion in net bookings for just the October to December quarter, the one GTA 6 launches in. For comparison, the quarter it just reported came in at $1.60 billion.
That quarter, which ran July through September, was the calm before the storm. Net bookings fell 18% from $1.96 billion a year earlier, and Take-Two posted a GAAP net loss of $54.0 million. NBA 2K, the Grand Theft Auto series, Toon Blast, Match Factory! and Empires & Puzzles were the biggest contributors, with NBA 2K27 launching September 4.
And here’s the twist. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, NBA 2K27 missed Take-Two’s sales expectations because of GTA 6 itself. “GTA VI will be so huge that it’s had a negative impact on sales of AAA games across the industry this year, including the other ones from the company behind it,” Schreier wrote. When your biggest game is so big it eats into your second-biggest game, that’s a problem most publishers would love to have.
For Xbox players, the release confirms the basics in plain black and white: Grand Theft Auto VI launches November 19, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S. Take-Two’s listed lineup also includes Judas from Ghost Story Games on Xbox Series X|S and PC, plus PGA TOUR 2K27, WWE 2K27 and the next BioShock, all still undated. Take-Two also named continued growth in the Xbox Series X|S installed base as one of the key assumptions behind its forecast, which tells you how much of this year rides on console players showing up on the 19th.
Our read: the numbers say Take-Two is betting the whole year on one week, and the company sounds completely comfortable with that bet. A soft summer, a loss on paper and an NBA 2K miss would normally rattle a publisher. Instead, Take-Two is pointing straight at November 19 and telling investors the pre-orders already prove it. The Xbox preload is already live, and if the launch lands anywhere near what “unprecedented” implies, this quarter will be the last time GTA 6 makes Take-Two look small.
Take-Two says GTA 6 pre-orders are "unprecedented." Is it the biggest launch ever?
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Image: Rockstar Games (official GTA VI Artwork & Wallpapers; Jason and Lucia Lock and Load landscape).
Sources
- Take-Two Interactive: Reports Results for Fiscal Second Quarter 2027 (Business Wire, Nov 9, 2026)
- Variety: ‘GTA 6’ Preorders: Expectations Ahead of Launch
- IGN: Take-Two Boss Strauss Zelnick on GTA 6 Expectations, GTA Online, and the Decade to Come
- iGrandTheftAuto on X (Zelnick GTA Online quote via IGN)
- Insider Gaming: GTA 7 Won’t Take as Long as GTA 6, Says Take-Two CEO
- Insider Gaming: GTA 5 Sales Reach Almost 235 Million Copies Since Launch
- Jason Schreier on X, citing Bloomberg
- The Verge: GTA VI pre-orders are tracking “far above” Take-Two’s initial expectations
- Tom Warren on X
- GamesBeat: All the takeaways about GTA VI from the Take-Two earnings call
- GTAVice: GTA 6 Development Complete, Future Plans, PC Release & More: Take-Two Earnings Call Roundup
- Bloomberg: Take-Two’s NBA 2K Sales Miss Expectations Due to Grand Theft Auto VI
