By Sagar V. Mankar 
Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has hinted that GTA Online might stay active even after Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out. This news should reassure fans who have spent years building their online characters and businesses.
The current online mode has been running for over 10 years and still has millions of active players. According to IGN’s recent interview with Zelnick, the company tends to keep supporting games as long as players remain interested.
“Generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles,” Zelnick explained. To make his point clearer, he mentioned NBA 2K Online in China, which launched in 2012 and continues to operate today, despite NBA 2K Online 2 being released in 2017.
While Zelnick couldn’t directly confirm plans for GTA Online since the next version hasn’t been officially announced, his message seemed clear: “We’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”
This approach makes business sense. As long as players keep spending money on the current GTA Online, there’s little reason for Take-Two to shut it down. This is especially true since GTA 6 will only be available on newer consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, leaving many players unable to upgrade right away.
The situation isn’t unique to Grand Theft Auto. Other popular game series follow similar patterns. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 still has nearly three million active daily players, even though Black Ops 6 came out in October. Even the older Modern Warfare 2 maintains about 1.5 million daily players on Steam.
Sometimes players stick with older games because they’re more stable and reliable. New games often launch with technical problems, as happened with Payday 3, which was nearly unplayable at release. Many gamers chose to stay with the decade-old Payday 2 instead.
Long-time GTA Online players might remember that GTA 5 itself had many issues when it first launched. Only after these were fixed did it become the incredibly popular game that has lasted for more than a decade.
While there’s still no official announcement about GTA Online’s future, the CEO’s hints suggest Rockstar isn’t planning to close it anytime soon. Players will likely be able to enjoy Los Santos for quite a while before potentially moving to Vice City in GTA 6.