Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI is the biggest game coming out this year. It’s expected to drive more than $1 billion in preorder revenue alone and sell 40 million copies in its first year. Unsurprisingly, then, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has said he thinks the game could help lift console sales. That would be a welcome development, too, as console hardware had a brutal 2024.
“When you have a big title in the market and we have many of them coming, historically that has sold consoles,” Zelnick told IGN. He’s referring to Take-Two’s upcoming game slate, which includes not just GTA 6 in Fall 2025, but also games like WWE 2K25 (March 14, 2025), Mafia: The Old Country (Summer 2025), and Borderlands 4 (sometime in 2025).
Zelnick said he’s predicting an uptick in console sales in 2025, though he’s wary of the impact President Trump’s proposed tariffs could have on the hardware market. Overall, though, Zelnick said Take-Two’s games, and strong releases from other publishers, should help lift console sales in general in 2025.
Beyond the console, Zelnick said PC is a platform showing signs of strength that is worth paying attention to when analyzing market trends overall in 2025. “I think the trend that you’d want to focus on is this increasing share of the market that is reflected in PC,” Zelnick said.
Despite Zelnick’s enthusiasm for the PC space, there is no mandate that all of Take-Two’s games ship on every platform at the same time, which might explain why GTA 6 is not coming to PC at launch.
On the subject of tariffs, Zelnick said they could be “negative for console sales.” New, higher tariffs on goods coming into the US from Mexico and Canada were recently paused, but could potentially be enacted further down the road. Zelnick isn’t excited for that future. “I’m a free trader so generally speaking I don’t think tariffs are the right way to build or tax an economy,” he said.
Console sales in the US plummeted in 2024, and while a downturn was always expected given the age of the consoles in the market, the dropoff was worse than some expected. PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch sales are all down, with Switch specifically expected to have its worst year of all time this year.
In terms of new hardware coming to market, Nintendo is launching the Switch 2 this year, while the next Xbox platform is in the works as well. Meanwhile, Sony is believed to be working on the PS6.