GTA 6 Launch Will Also be ‘Positive’ for Ubisoft, CEO Says

No one knows exactly when Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch outside of Take-Two and Rockstar, but some people are in better positions to take guesses than others. One of those better-equipped guessers is Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, whose job involves making business plans that account for competitors’ massive game releases. At the moment, Guillemot is expecting a GTA 6 release sometime after March 2025 – and he’s feeling pretty good about it.

During Ubisoft’s Q3 earnings call today, Guillemot was asked how Ubisoft was thinking about their upcoming games lineup now that GTA 6 has been officially announced. The asker suggested the game was expected to target the end of fiscal 2025, which for Ubisoft would mean sometime in January through March of 2025.

Guillemot responded as follows:

What we’ve seen in the past is that each time there’s a big release like GTA, there are more and more people coming back to the industry, and that helps other games to sell as well. We see it for sure. We look at this and we are really organizing things around the launch of that game, which we do not know exactly when it is going to happen. We consider it will be closer to our financial year ’26 than our financial year ’25. But what we’ve seen is that generally it’s actually positive for the market, and we did a good launch with the launch of GTA 5 first launch and GTA 5 online game, each time we were able to generate really good revenue and profit on the games we launched.

To clarify, this means Guillemot is expecting GTA 6 won’t show up until April of 2025 or later, which does fit with the official release window Take-Two gave of just “2025.” But this is notably a little later than what some have been speculating based on past remarks by Take-Two Interactive, GTA 6’s publisher. Previously, Take-Two made bold projections about “groundbreaking titles” releasing in its own fiscal 2025 (which lines up with Ubisoft’s) that would bring them to “achieve over $8 billion in net bookings,” followed by even higher results in fiscal 2026. This could mean GTA 6 has been quietly pushed back behind the scenes, but it’s also possible this prediction was never intended to be about GTA 6 in the first place, but a number of analysts took that to mean GTA 6 would be a fiscal 2025 game.

Whatever the case, everything is still speculation and we won’t know GTA 6’s release date until we’re told what it is. But if you were expecting to be able to play it first thing in 2025, you might want to temper your hopes a bit.

What’s maybe more interesting is Guillemot’s statement that a GTA 6 release will be good for Ubisoft too. It’s long been known that AAA game companies will frequently sweat over when to release games so they don’t have to compete with other major releases that might drown them out, so it’d be natural for Ubisoft to want to avoid having any of its own major releases debut around the same time as GTA 6. But Guillemot’s point that a game like GTA 6 will draw people into video games who haven’t played them in a while or even ever before is an apt one. After they get done with GTA 6, players will want something else to do, and that something might just be an Ubisoft game.

We finally got our first look at GTA 6 later last year, when the first official trailer leaked less than 24 hours before it was supposed to debut. We learned at the time that it currently isn’t planned for PC at launch, and that it will feature dual protagonists including a new fan-beloved heroine named Lucia. For more information, check out our roundup of everything we’ve learned about the game so far.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].