In 2020, I pondered how Grand Theft Auto Online would end. At the time, nearly seven years after launch, GTA Online was bigger than ever. But it would have to wrap up one day. Now, in 2026, after hackers recently published leaked data showing that GTA Online brings in over $1 million a day on average, and with Grand Theft Auto 6 still not out, I’m even more curious how or when or even if Rockstar Games can shut off GTA Online or convince players to move on to the new thing. It seems like an impossible situation with no easy answer.
Launched in 2013, Grand Theft Auto V’s multiplayer mode, Grand Theft Auto Online, was a small, messy trash fire in those early months. Rockstar has admitted as much in the years since. The game was plagued by server disconnects, lost progress, and a lack of stuff to do, making it seem like GTA Online was doomed to fail. But Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive poured a lot of time, resources, and money into improving, upgrading, and expanding GTA Online. New content, like long-awaited heists, was added via free updates that also brought with them new locations to buy, businesses to run, weapons to use, vehicles to drive, and even fresh tunes.
All this work paid off. By 2017, Rockstar was reporting more players than ever before were hopping into GTA Online. So it wasn’t surprising to see, via leaked data obtained by hacker group ShinyHunters, that in the last six months, GTA Online has averaged around $1.3 million a day in revenue. The company has also sold around $5 billion in Shark Cards since 2013, which provide players with in-game cash that can be used to buy cars, clothes, and so on.
In a world filled with failed live-service games, these are impressive numbers. The kind of numbers that most studios and publishers would do unspeakable things to get. So it is very wild to remember that in about seven months or so, assuming another delay doesn’t happen, Rockstar Games will release GTA 6. The game will include a multiplayer mode. And that puts Rockstar Games in a strange place. How do you defeat one of the biggest, most profitable games in the world, one that you happen to have developed and continue to support? Do you even try? Can it be done? Or can they co-exist?
What happens to GTA Online after GTA 6?
So far, there has been no indication from Rockstar that it plans to take GTA Online out behind the bar and blow its head off anytime soon. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also made it clear that he expects Rockstar to continue to support GTA Online after the launch of GTA 6 in November.
“I have every reason to believe we’ll continue to support GTA Online,” said Zelnick during an earnings call in February. “There’s a great community that loves it, that stays engaged. And again in this quarter, Rockstar has shown that when you deliver great additional content, despite how long [GTA Online] has been at market, people show up.”
But…I wouldn’t expect the publisher or developer behind a game making a million dollars a day to suggest plans to wind it down anytime soon. However, I do believe Zelnick is correct. There is no reason GTA Online has to shut down the moment GTA 6 arrives. GTA Online will still have millions of players and will still be making a ton of money every day. And there is some historic precedent here.
When GTA Online arrived on PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, Rockstar didn’t kill the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions right away. Instead, all versions of the game continued to get the same updates, despite players on PS3/Xbox 360 not being able to play with PS4/Xbox One users. Then in 2015, Ill-Gotten Gains Part 2 arrived and was the last major content update for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. Yet these older versions continued kicking until they were shut down in 2021, nearly six years after they received a major content drop. And when the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of GTA Online arrived in 2022, Rockstar didn’t stop supporting the PS4 and Xbox One ports. In fact, as of April 2026, both the current and last-gen versions receive the same updates. (Though the newer ports do get a few extra goodies from time to time.)
The point is that, historically speaking, Rockstar hasn’t been quick to kill any version of GTA Online. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that GTA Online as we know it today will go away anytime soon, even after GTA 6 launches in November. The question that I think is more interesting is whether GTA Online will co-exist with GTA 6 or if Rockstar will try and fail, like many other studios, to kill its successful predecessor with a new shiny sequel.
Competing with GTA Online might be impossible
GTA Online right now is about as popular and lucrative as it’s ever been. The game’s most recent major update, A Safehouse In The Hills, was well received by the community and brought back more players than usual. It added highly requested luxurious mansions to buy and even moved the narrative of GTA V forward by featuring Michael, one of the main characters from the single-player campaign. It’s an update built on years of past content, player feedback, and history. In other words, it’s the kind of content that GTA 6’s multiplayer won’t receive anytime soon.
I expect Rockstar has learned a lot about making live-service games since 2013, so GTA 6‘s online mode will likely be bigger and more stable than GTA Online was at launch. Yet, it seems nearly impossible that it will feature more missions and things to do and buy than GTA Online does in 2026. There’s no way Rockstar can compete with a decade-plus of updates, patches, and events. So right out of the gate, GTA 6‘s multiplayer mode will be at a disadvantage.
There are also plenty of recent examples of big titles getting sequels that failed to capture the audience of the first game. We’ve seen this play out with games like Payday 3, a first-person online bank-robbing FPS that launched in 2023 and, for various reasons, failed to win over Payday 2 players. As of April 2026, Payday 3 averages around 400 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. Meanwhile, Payday 2 averages around 20,000 active players or more. Ouch. Kerbal Space Program 2 suffered a similar fate. The sequel launched in 2023, flopped with fans for a number of reasons, and now lingers at around 350 concurrent players on Steam. And the OG Kerbal Space Program? It regularly has over 15,000 active players at any point in time.
Now, GTA 6 will have a big advantage over most other game sequels as it’s almost guaranteed to sell a gazillion copies in its first few days alone. Few games have had as much anticipation and hype around them as GTA 6. It could ship without multiplayer and still be a hit. So I expect GTA 6‘s online mode will have a strong start, but will it be able to hold players’ attention, or will many of them return to GTA Online to enjoy their large bank accounts, fancy mansions, and cool cars? Because it’s not just a lack of content that GTA 6‘s online mode has to contend with, but also: So many GTA Online players have years’ worth of clothing, garages, and more. Will they make the leap to the new online experience?
Will players give it all up for GTA 6?
I would be shocked if Rockstar Games let players roll into GTA 6’s multiplayer mode with all of the cash, cars, and guns they’d collected back in GTA Online. Allowing players to do that would cause all sorts of headaches.
First off, how would Rockstar even balance millionaire players showing up day one with small armies and jet bikes? That would be unfair to new players hopping on GTA 6 who played little to no GTA Online beforehand. It would also mean items would have to be priced at much higher prices to take into account some players rolling around with hundreds of millions of dollars.
There’s also the reality that all of these older items and guns would look out of place in GTA 6‘s higher-fidelity world. And considering the fact that GTA Online today still has some lower-res clothes from the PS3/PS4 era of the game floating around next to much nicer-looking PS5-era items, I’m not convinced Rockstar would want to go back and remake every single piece of clothing for GTA 6′s online mode. Besides, if that happened, people would be less likely to buy any new clothes or cosmetics, and I don’t think the bean counters would be happy about that.
I think it’s safe to say that when you boot up GTA 6‘s online mode later this year, you’ll arrive with very little. Perhaps a few extra goodies to reward longtime GTA Online players, but all your cash, guns, and drugs will be stuck in Los Santos. For people who have spent a decade or more playing GTA Online every week, leaving all that behind might be hard, especially if GTA 6′s online mode fails to deliver at launch.
And I’ve not even touched on GTA V’s massive roleplay community on PC, which operates through FiveM, a mod created by fans that is now owned by Rockstar Games and is making the company a lot of money as people buy GTA V on Steam to pretend to be cops and firefighters. That’s a whole other thing Rockstar’s next game has to compete with, once it arrives on PC at least.
GTA Online vs GTA 6
This all leaves Rockstar in a strange spot. It has GTA Online, one of the most successful, long-running live-service video games around right now. A game making a million dollars a day. It can’t kill the servers, because that would be a terrible PR move and would turn off a money-printing machine for Take-Two and its investors. And to compete against GTA Online is a near-impossible battle for the reasons laid out above. That leaves one last very likely, but strange option: coexistence.
GTA 6’s multiplayer mode and GTA Online will likely live side-by-side for at least a few years. That sounds hard. Rockstar and its various studios will have to manage and maintain two different live-service games. That ain’t something I imagine anyone wants to do. So Rockstar will definitely try to get people to make the leap from the old game to the new one. I expect it will take time to move enough users from one to the other and to reach a point where GTA 6 is printing money at a rate that satisfies the bean counters. At that point, GTA Online‘s future becomes a lot less clear. It could linger around for years. Or it could be killed by 2028. That will come down to players and money.
Regardless, it is going to be strange to watch a decade-old live-service game built for Xbox 360 compete against the latest PS5-era super blockbuster from Rockstar Games.
