With all the money earned by film franchises like Avengers: Endgame and TV series like Game of Thrones, it may seem hard to believe that the highest-grossing entertainment product of all time has nothing to do with either movies or television. It’s a video game, Grand Theft Auto V, which has grossed over $6 billion since its release in 2013 — more than double the amount that Endgame took in at the worldwide box office. Now, GTA V is getting a sequel at long last, and all bets are off when it comes to guessing just how much money this game will rake in.
But before you start saving your pennies, you should know that we’re probably still a few years away from Grand Theft Auto 6. It has only just been reported by Kotaku that Rockstar, the game studio behind the franchise, is working on the sequel. And since video games take years to produce — in the case of massive open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, many years — it’s going to be a long wait before we actually get our hands on the game. For example, Rockstar’s last game, Red Dead Redemption 2, was in production for seven years. This all but guarantees that the game will only be available for the next generation of consoles, the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, and not your current PS4 or Xbox One.
However, the Kotaku story does claim that GTA 6 may begin as a smaller game that then becomes larger over time thanks to updates, meaning the wait time may not be quite as long as fans fear. “One plan that management has laid out for the next game, a new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, is to start out with a moderately sized release (which, by Rockstar’s standards, would still be a large game) that is then expanded with regular updates over time,” writes Kotaku’s Jason Schreier.
Whether it takes two years or a decade, the fact that we’re getting another GTA game at all seems like a reason to celebrate to us.
