Reading between the lines of a recent Take Two investor call it doesn’t sound like we’ll see anything from GTA developer Rockstar this side of 2018.
Speaking in the call, CEO Strauss Zelnick talked up GTA 5's overall success (65 million sales world wide) and confirmed GTA Online’s ability to print money. He then mentioned that “Rockstar Games is, of course, also hard at work, and some exciting future projects will be revealed soon”.
Revealed when though? As part of the end of year financials the company announced its release slate for the year, specifically: NBA 2K17, Mafia 3, Civilization 6 and WWE 2K17. Zelnick then confirmed that “to clarify, we've announced the entire release schedule for the year”.
So that shuts down a new Rockstar game this year (which isn’t a huge surprise) but what about the future? That’s where chief financial officer Lainie Goldstein comes in, saying, “we have very good visibility into our pipeline and given what we see, and also our ability to continue to grow recurring consumer spending in the context of great new releases, that gives us high confidence in fiscal year 2018 growth”.
So clearly the publisher has high hopes for something in 2018 and it sounds like it might have a GTA-like online component for "recurring consumer spending" . When asked where that confidence was coming from Zelnick answered, “it's what we're working on at our development studios”.
We certainly won’t be seeing a GTA again as soon as 2018, but there has been some very spurious and poorly confirmed Red Dead Redemption sequel rumours, so I’m going to guess we could see a reveal at this year’s E3 for a 2018 release. And I bet it copies GTA Online's multiplayer model.
