GTA 6 Game Pass
It seems that Take-Two Interactive's CEO Strauss Zelnick is a little sceptical about putting AAA titles like GTA 6 onto Game Pass.
Will there be a GTA 6 Game Pass? Well, unfortunately, probably not, but that doesn’t mean there could be one in the distant future. Grand Theft Auto’s overall popularity as a franchise practically guarantees a major number of sales, thus making a Game Pass release all the less likely.
Will GTA 6 be available on Game Pass at launch?
Following a Take-Two Interactive Software Q1 2025 earnings call on August 8, 2024, Take-Two’s own CEO Strauss Zelnick hinted that a GTA 6 Game Pass release would not be in the works.
It’s more than an understatement to say that GTA has been an incredibly successful franchise, particularly GTA 5 and its multiplayer counterpart GTA Online. Over the course of its lifetime, GTA 5 and GTA Online have generated billions of dollars in direct game sales and microtransactions.
Putting it simply, GTA 6 will likely be too successful for Game Pass. On its own, GTA 6 sales could easily eclipse any earnings made from selling new Game Pass subscriptions. Even Zelnick seems to know this. When asked in 2022 what he thought of AAA games being made available for Game Pass at launch, Zelnick stated “That doesn’t make any sense to us, because economically speaking, we don’t think consumers are prepared to pay for that.”
More recently, Zelnick told GamesIndustry.biz that “offering a frontline title with a premium price in a subscription service, day and date, will push consumers to that subscription service for at least a period of time.” However, Microsoft’s push towards Game Pass wouldn’t “affect our decisions. Because our decisions are rational.”
Will GTA 6 ever come to Game Pass?
Zelnick has not strictly stated that GTA 6 will be unavailable on Game Pass in the future. In fact, in all likelyhood, GTA 6 will eventually become available, even if only for a brief time, and likely a year or two following the release date. After all, GTA 5 has become available on and off via Game Pass, even if it’s just the online mode.
Ultimately, once overall sales of the base game have cooled off (at least compared to the game’s initial release), it’s very likely that GTA 6 will be used as an incentive to encourage Game Pass subscriptions. The only real questions are when and if Take-Two Interactive will ever consider such a move after the GTA 6 release date and the GTA 6 PC port.