GTA 6 on PC isn’t an afterthought — it’s a second payday

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On a completely different and unrelated note: Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick gave an interview to Bloomberg to discuss the company’s next project. Grand Theft Auto 6in which he asserts that the PC is not the “main consumer” of the company.

“Rockstar always starts on console because I think when it comes to a release like that, you’re judged by the core,” Zelnick told Bloomberg. “It’s like really serving the core consumer. If your core consumer isn’t there, if they’re not served first and at best, you’re kind of not reaching your other consumers… Historically, Rockstar has gone console first.”

Whether games from Take-Two subsidiary Rockstar debut on console before slowly making their way to PC has been a point of contention for years. For a small development team, taking time to port a game is understandable (although these days, smaller games are usually to start on PC and then on console). But Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest media franchises on the planet. GTA 5 sold more than 200 million copies, and even 13 years and two generations of consoles after its initial release, it is still at the top of sales. GTA6 is estimated at a cost greater than billion dollars to grow. The idea that Rockstar could somehow be limited by its development resources is laughable.

Never mind that these days, cross-platform development has never been easier. Both the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 are based on AMD APU designs that share PC architecture, with only a bit of proprietary special sauce. Most game engines and development tools are cross-platform, including Unreal 5 and Unity, designed for rapid deployment to PC, consoles, and even mobile (the Switch and Switch 2 are based on Arm). Hell, the very fact that Rockstar’s own games like GTA 5 And Red Dead Redemption 2 coming to PC with better graphics and more options is proof that it’s possible, and not too difficult compared to the initial development of these games.

Zelnick’s own statements appear to undermine his “primary audience” argument. He said that when he founded the publisher in 2007, PC could account for 5% of sales for a game like this. NBA 2K. Today, that’s 45-50% of that game, even when sports titles tend to work better on consoles to take advantage of a living room multiplayer setup. Neither Take-Two nor Rockstar have given any report on how GTA 5 Or Red Dead Redemption 2 sold with a platform failure, but the latter is currently #34 on Steam’s weekly sales chart, just ahead of the big hit Baldur III’s Gate (which came out 10 years later).

So, who is the “primary consumer”? Grand Theft Auto in 2026? Once again, Take-Two doesn’t make the determination easy. A recent Rockstar data leak indicates that the PS5 has more than half of reservations, i.e. in-game purchases, in GTA Onlinethe open-world multiplayer counterpart of GTA 5. The game still generates about $9 million per week for Rockstar through microtransactions and other revenue, with only about a quarter of a million coming from PC players.

This certainly supports the idea that the console is the source of the money. But these are not the only data to take into account. According to the same data disclosed, GTA 5 sold more than 34 million copies on PC between June 2021 and March 2026, which represents approximately 46% of total sales across all platforms.

It’s a little confusing because GTA 5 is such an old game that even in 2021, most PlayStation and Xbox gamers (now a generation or two ahead of the game’s initial release) would have at least one copy of GTA 5 if they wanted to. But it seems painfully obvious that Rockstar would sell an absolutely staggering amount of copies to PC gamers if GTA6 were released on the same day as its planned debut on PlayStation and Xbox.

Conventional wisdom has it that Rockstar delays PC releases by a year or more to try to sell multiple copies or versions to gamers who own both a console and a PC. It’s “two bites at the apple,” as Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier describes it. PC gamers have wanted them for a long time, but don’t seem to have a problem buying Rockstar games when they finally arrive.

If you’re a PC gamer and unhappy about having to buy a PlayStation to play GTA6 any time soon, I may be able to offer you a balm: although Rockstar games take a year or more to reach our shores, they tend to arrive with many initial bugs and headaches ironed out, as well as additional features like improved visuals and the first-person mode that GTA 5 was released on PC in 2015. And if you’re like me, you have a dozen new games in your Steam library to help you out.