Take-Two aims to more than double marketing budget in 2023 and 202424

Game publisher Take-Two Interactive plans to deploy a significantly higher marketing budget in the 2024 fiscal year, which runs from the beginning of October 2023 to the end of September 2024. It is more than doubling. Perhaps that means the arrival of GTA 6 in 2023.

Take-Two Interactive plans to spend more than $89 million for marketing purposes in fiscal 2024. That’s more than double the amounts quoted for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, $38.9 million and $40.9 million, respectively. A marketing budget of $35.5 million is quoted for the fiscal year of 2025. This makes it clear that the fiscal year of 2024 will be an outlier in terms of the marketing budget.

These amounts are defined as the annual minimum contractual obligations and commitments; they are not yet set in stone, but they are a good indication of what it will come down to. The publisher reports its intended marketing releases in a comprehensive Form 10-K document. This is an annual report that parties must prepare from the American regulator: the Securities and Exchange Commission. In these reports, companies must provide a comprehensive overview of their financial performance and expenditure, but also provide information about the company structure, for example.

Grand Theft Auto is mentioned regularly in the report, but Take-Two says nothing about a possible arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. Analyst Jeff Cohen tells VentureBeat that such information from such publications previously also accurately predicted the arrival of Red Dead Redemption 2. According to him, the marked increase in the marketing budget could point to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6 in 2023.

For the time being, it is still unknown whether Grand Theft Auto 6 is actually planned for 2023. Developer Rockstar has not yet said anything about it. If the title actually comes out in the course of 2023, it will follow ten years after Grand Theft Auto V came out. That game was released in September 2013 and, together with Grand Theft Auto Online, still makes an important contribution to revenues, as recently revealed in the latest quarterly figures of Take-Two. CEO Strauss Zelnick explained in a verbal explanation that more than 130 million copies of the game have now been delivered.