By Motheo Tlhagale
In 2025 the global gaming industry generated close to $190 billion in revenue. That's more than the revenue from the global film (~$33 billion) and music (~$31.7 billion) industries combined. The growth in the industry is not merely coming from adding more players, but from increased value as players spend more money.
Over the years the gaming industry has evolved significantly. The traditional way of making games was simple. You made a game, released it and sold as many copies as you could, then started working on the next one. Most of the money came in around the launch time, meaning the financial success of a gaming company often relied on how well a few new games did each year.
That model has changed, with many of the games today maintaining revenue generation long after their release. Most of the industry's revenue now comes from games that are more than five years old, showing how successful games can keep making money long after the initial launch. Subscriptions, content, microtransactions and live-service features have become primary paths for game companies to keep earning money even after the game is bought.
Grand Theft Auto, or GTA, is a classic example of this. Since it was released in 2013, more than 210 million copies of GTA V have been sold, making over $7.6 billion in revenue. That money did not stop when players bought the game. GTA Online helped Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (the parent company) keep generating revenue from players through in-game purchases, new content and subscription services, long after.
We think this history makes the highly-anticipated GTA VI an interesting investment opportunity. While there are already expectations for how many copies the game will sell at launch, the bigger opportunity is not just in the first year but rather the long-term success of the franchise. This of course depends on Take-Two's ability to keep players interested and, in turn, earning from them over the next several years.
The console cycle
Console gaming, which uses a video game console that connects to a television or other display medium and uses a user interface to allow interaction with digital games, typically through a game controller or joystick, was the fastest-growing segment in 2025 and continued to generate the highest spending per player. Well-known video games consoles include brands Nintendo, PlayStation, Sony and Xbox. Despite only accounting for roughly a quarter of industry revenue, console gaming's higher average revenue per user (ARPU) explains why major releases such as GTA VI remain important to publishers and platform owners.
Current installed base and cycle maturity
While the market is not completely saturated, the latest console generation is becoming more mature. Sony's PlayStation 5 (PS5) has sold about 93.7 million units globally as of March 2026, following its initial launch in November 2020. Future hardware demand will likely depend more on consumers replacing older systems, changes in the console's price, and major software releases that encourage people to upgrade.
GTA VI as a console cycle catalyst
Major game releases have also often helped re-catalyse demand for hardware especially when a game is not available on older consoles. GTA V first came out on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2013. Then it arrived on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014, which allowed players access to the game on both newer and older console generations. As such, GTA VI offers a chance to push hardware upgrades since the game will launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, as per American video game publisher and a subsidiary of Take-Two, Rockstar Games.
Next-generation console timing
Console generations are also getting longer with cycles that may stretch from the six or seven years to nine or ten years. This is because small upgrades in graphics and performance, between console generations, can lower the urge to buy new or additional hardware while longer cycles allow publishers to earn more from the same console hardware for a longer time. With next generation consoles (e.g., PS6 / Next-Gen Xbox) widely expected to arrive around 2027 to 2028, this could mean GTA VI is likely to launch before the big console change, aligning with Rockstar's historical release strategy. Launching right before new hardware arrives maximises its immediate player base, as well over 100 million current-gen consoles are already in living rooms. This also allows the company to release an enhanced version for the new hardware a year later, if we use GTA V as an example to go by, followed by PC, and in that way allowing them to sell the game across multiple hardware generations. So, the timing could give GTA VI a window to boost software sales and persuade some players to buy current generation consoles before the next hardware cycle begins.
The wider gaming backdrop is supportive of the sector, driven by a growing player base, digital distribution, in-game monetisation and longer-lived franchises. While consoles are relatively expensive discretionary purchases, they are far more accessible than big ticket items such as cars and could be easier to justify to gaming enthusiasts. Rising development costs support scaled publishers with strong intellectual property (IP) and recurring revenues. Tencent, the world's largest video game company by total annual revenue, is well positioned thanks to its strong mobile and PC position, large gaming portfolio and investments in global developers, with diversified exposure to the console cycle.
Who captures the value
A major game launch creates value across the gaming industry. The companies selling the game benefit the most, particularly the publisher, but the value created by a successful launch also flows to platform owners and, to a lesser extent, the companies supplying the hardware.
Take-Two is at the centre of the GTA VI opportunity. Through its ownership of Rockstar Games and the GTA franchise, it receives revenue from game sales, subscriptions and spending within GTA Online. This gives the company exposure to both the initial launch and the spending that follows.
Sony, through PlayStation, earns a high-margin of digital game sales and in-game purchases without having to bear the development costs itself. With a commanding ~73% lead in current-gen console install base (roughly 95 million active systems globally), its dominant market share anchors a massive user ecosystem. This unmatched volume positions Sony to capture most software monetisation surrounding the upcoming launch of GTA VI, creating a powerful tailwind to offset recent global hardware manufacturing cost pressures.
Microsoft will also capture transaction revenue from active ecosystem player engagement on Xbox Series X/S. However, the direct upside is bounded by its smaller hardware footprint, holding approximately a 27% share of the next-gen console market. GTA VI software revenues will provide a welcome base floor for gaming content, but the title will not materially alter Microsoft's overall earnings given the much larger contribution of its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) businesses.
The potential gains become less direct higher up the value chain. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) supplies processors for the current PlayStation and Xbox consoles, so stronger hardware demand could drive up chip sales. Nvidia could see a similar effect when GTA VI eventually launches on PC, particularly if players upgrade their graphics cards to run the game at higher settings. Gaming accounts for a small share of overall revenue for both AMD and Nvidia, thus the effect on group earnings is likely to be limited.
The risks right now
The massive corporate push towards AI data centres has caused a supply chain issue that has constrained innovation in consumer graphics. As semiconductor manufacturers have focused on higher margin enterprise AI chips, resources have been diverted away from consumer products. This has led NVIDIA to cancel its 2026 launch of a new gaming GPU architecture and caused similar issues for AMD. For game developers, this has meant that the expansion in middle-tier hardware targets has stopped, forcing teams to optimise their titles for existing and aging hardware longer than they otherwise would.
Simultaneously, the immense computational needs of training AI models has slowed the expansion of cloud gaming infrastructure. Tech giants like Microsoft are pouring their capital into AI infrastructure rather than expanding their consumer gaming server blades. To ensure that their precious data centre bandwidth is devoted to more profitable AI enterprise projects, Microsoft and NVIDIA alike have placed limits on the number of hours available for cloud streaming. This has altered the distribution landscape, shrinking the addressable market space for developers making titles for the clouds.
On the flip side, the internal software pipeline in game studios has undergone an immense increase in efficiency thanks to these data centres. Automated generative processes have accelerated tedious development pipelines, radically shrinking the median setup time of new platforms in the last few years. By rapidly automating processes like localisation, the testing of environment assets, and boilerplate scripting, the technology has allowed small development teams of 15 to 49 people to create vast worlds that would otherwise require much larger, multi-studio budgets.
GTA franchise economics: Take-Two
Take-Two's business is built around a portfolio of major franchises spanning Rockstar Games, 2K and Zynga, with GTA representing its most important long-term intellectual property. Besides GTA, its largest contributors to recent bookings have included, NBA 2K, Red Dead Redemption, and a broad portfolio of mobile franchises. In FY26, Take-Two generated $6.7 billion in net bookings, up 19% year-on-year, even before the launch of GTA VI.
What's important is Take-Two's ability to effectively monetise its releases long after the initial game purchase. Recurrent consumer spending thus includes margin-accretive extra content, in-game purchases and ads. This type of spending made up 78% of sales in FY26, and in 1Q27 this number went up to 84%.
Currently Take-Two trades on a forward PE multiple of about 23.2 times, which is below its long-term average and well below 2025-highs. The previous valuation premium has largely unwound due to several factors including:
The market has now reset expectations to a base-case multiple leaving meaningful upside optionality if the 19 November launch delivers.
Conclusion
The release of GTA VI will be one of the biggest entertainment releases ever, but its significance goes beyond launch-week sales figures and records. It arrives at a time when the economics of the gaming business are increasingly based on long-running franchises, digital distribution and repeat play rather than a constant stream of new releases.
The commercial success of GTA V proved that a single franchise could remain relevant to consumers for more than a decade beyond its release. GTA VI will show how far this model can be pushed. Its commercial success will be judged not on copies sold but on Rockstar's ability to retain consumers, grow GTA Online and increase its share of consumers' gaming spend.
The launch also reflects a wider reality within the industry. Development costs are higher, production cycles are longer, and the resources required to produce blockbuster titles have increased. The more established the IP, the larger the player community. More so, the greater the financial resources to develop and support a game for many years, the better it can be funded, first by publishers and then by the platform owners.
For investors, GTA VI offers a lens through which to view the future of gaming. The attractive opportunities are likely to be found in the companies that own valuable franchises, control large player communities or sit at the centre of player spending. While the launch itself is likely to provide a boost to earnings, across parts of the industry, the longer-term value will be determined by how those companies convert player engagement into durable cash flows. In that sense, GTA VI is not only a game launch, it is a test to see what is the maximum value that can be generated from a single franchise in a market where attention, engagement, and player retention have become essential assets to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
