GTA 6 is propping up the 2026 console market, Newzoo says
Newzoo published its 2026 forecast for the global console market on August 27, 2026: $46.9 billion, up 5.1 percent. Without Grand Theft Auto VI, the firm says, that growth would not be there.
GTA6 LIFE
Newzoo expects $46.9 billion in global console revenue in 2026, up 5.1 percent year on year, and reckons the increase would not exist without Grand Theft Auto VI. Emmanuel Rosier, the firm’s market intelligence director, put it to GamesIndustry.biz on August 27, 2026:
If in 2026, let’s say Grand Theft Auto 6 wasn’t coming out, then you would have a platform going down year-on-year. GTA is really helping consoles achieve positive growth in 2026.
Newzoo is neither Rockstar Games nor Take-Two. These are outputs of an analyst model, not measurements, and no figure among them has been picked up by the publisher. The same forecast has console spending on full games rising 17.5 percent in 2026, credited to the same game.
The number missing from Rosier’s remark is the growth itself. A 5.1 percent rise landing at $46.9 billion implies a 2025 market near $44.6 billion, so roughly $2.3 billion of extra revenue this year. Rosier hangs that order of magnitude on a title released November 19, six weeks before the calendar year closes.
| Figure | What it measures | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| $46.9 billion | Global console revenue expected in 2026 | Newzoo, cited by GamesIndustry.biz on August 27, 2026 |
| up 5.1 percent | Expected growth of that same market year on year | same source |
| up 17.5 percent | Expected rise in console spending on full games | same source |
| $8.0 to $8.2 billion | Net bookings Take-Two guides for fiscal 2027, closing March 31, 2027 | Take-Two, August 7, 2026 results |
| $6.72 billion | Net bookings Take-Two booked in fiscal 2026 | Take-Two, May 21, 2026 results |
Two products, one growth line, and no split published
Newzoo does not put all of it on GTA 6. Its forecast credits 2026 growth to two products, Rockstar’s game and Nintendo’s Switch 2, and the firm publishes no share for either. Rosier gave none on August 27. His sentence says only that the platform would decline without the game, which places its contribution above the gap between 2025 and 2026 without sizing it. How much of that $2.3 billion belongs to the game and how much to the console: not published.
Take-Two is not counting the same year
The publisher guides $8.0 to $8.2 billion in net bookings for fiscal 2027, a year closing March 31, 2027, and ties the range explicitly to the November 19 launch. Against the $6.72 billion booked in fiscal 2026, that is a gain of $1.28 to $1.48 billion. The two counts do not cover the same ground. Take-Two’s year runs four months into 2027, it counts PC and mobile alongside console, and it adds NBA 2K, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Zynga to GTA 6.
The current quarter says the same thing in reverse. Take-Two reported $1.39 billion of first quarter net bookings on August 7, 2026, down 3 percent year on year, and guides a net loss of $140 to $157 million for the July to September quarter. Those are the months without GTA 6. What follows rests on a date the publisher has kept in both of its last two earnings releases, which we went through in our piece on the November 19 date.
The $88 the model assumes
Newzoo works from an average of $88 per unit sold, a figure relayed by Gaming.net on July 16, 2026. Take-Two announced the two list prices on June 24, 2026: $79.99 for the Standard edition, $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. An $88 average between those two points implies about four buyers in ten taking the dearer one. Sensor Tower counted 89 percent of pre-orders on the Ultimate Edition as of August 13, 2026. The two readings do not line up, and Newzoo has not published the mix it works from.
On that $88 basis the firm put digital pre-order spend at $180 million across the United States and the five largest European markets in the final week of June, at roughly $260 million worldwide over the opening week, and at $3.25 to $5.2 billion cumulative by the end of launch week, in estimates carried by IGN on July 17, 2026. Set against $46.9 billion for the year, that single week would be 7 to 11 percent of the global console market of 2026.
Both figures announced on June 24 are list prices and nothing more. No dated United States retailer reading is available for this article, so no street price is quoted here. What each edition includes at those prices is laid out in our editions guide, and dated retailer readings go in our edition price tracker.
Take-Two has published no pre-order number, in units or in dollars, since pre-orders opened on June 25, 2026. Newzoo’s estimates, like those of the other firms gathered in our piece on how many copies GTA 6 will sell, are models rather than reported sales.
