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

Did you know you can just say things that aren’t true and there’s nothing anyone can do about it? Check this out: “My dog has six legs.” Bam, look at all the consequences I’m not facing for fibbing to you. In 2026, you can do this to an audience of millions—even in a courtroom or congressional hearing after swearing an oath—and nothing happens.

On a completely different and unrelated note: Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick gave an interview to Bloomberg discussing the company’s upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, in which he claimed that PC isn’t the company’s “core consumer.”

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

The fact that Take-Two subsidiary Rockstar’s games 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 generally start on PC and later go to console). But Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest media franchises on the planet. GTA 5 sold over 200 million copies, and even 13 years and two console generations after its initial release, it’s still sitting high on sales charts. GTA 6 is estimated to cost over a billion dollars to develop. The thought that Rockstar could be in any way limited by development resources is laughable.

Never mind that these days, developing cross-platform 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 in there. Most game engines and development tools are cross-platform, notably Unreal 5 and Unity, designed for rapid deployment across PCs, consoles, and even mobile (the Switch and Switch 2 are Arm-based). Hell, the very fact that Rockstar’s own games like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 come to PC with better graphics and more options is proof that it’s possible, and not overly difficult in comparison to the initial ground-up development of these games.

Zelnick’s own statements seem to undermine his “core audience” argument. He said that when he founded the publisher in 2007, PC might make 5 percent of the sales of a game like NBA 2K. Now it’s 45 to 50 percent of that game, even when sports titles tend to do better on consoles to take advantage of a living room multiplayer setup. Neither Take-Two nor Rockstar have given a report of how GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 have sold with a platform breakdown, but the latter is currently #34 on the Steam weekly sales chart, just ahead of the smash hit Baldur’s Gate III (which came out 10 years later).

So, what’s the “core consumer” for Grand Theft Auto in 2026? Again, Take-Two isn’t making it easy to determine. A recent bit of leaked Rockstar data indicates that the PS5 has over half of bookings—that is to say, in-game purchases—in GTA Online, the open-world multiplayer counterpart to GTA 5. The game still generates about $9 million a week for Rockstar via microtransactions and other income, with only about a quarter million coming from PC players.

That certainly backs up the idea that console is where the money is coming from. But it’s not the only data to consider. According to the same leaked data, GTA 5 sold over 34 million copies on PC between June 2021 and March 2026, accounting for about 46 percent of total sales across platforms.

This is a bit muddled by the fact that GTA 5 is such an old game—even in 2021, most PlayStation and Xbox players (now one or two generations ahead of the game’s initial release) would have at least one copy of GTA 5 if they wanted it. But it seems painfully obvious that Rockstar would sell an absolutely staggering amount of copies to PC gamers if GTA 6 were released on the same day as its planned PlayStation and Xbox debut.

Popular wisdom is that Rockstar delays PC releases by a year or more to try and sell multiple copies or versions to gamers who have both a console and a PC. It’s “two bites at the apple,” as Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier describes it. PC gamers have held a grudge about this for a long time, yet don’t seem to have any problem buying Rockstar games when they finally arrive.

If you’re a PC gamer who rankles at the thought of needing to buy a PlayStation to play GTA 6 anytime soon, maybe I can offer you a salve: Though Rockstar games do take a year or more to reach our shores, they tend to arrive with a lot of the initial bugs and headaches sorted out, plus extra features like enhanced visuals and the first-person mode that GTA 5 got upon its PC release in 2015. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve got a dozen or so unplayed games in your Steam library to tide you over.