GTA 6 Will Need 350 Million Sales to Dethrone Minecraft, Analysts Say

The numbers do not lie. Minecraft sits at 300 million plus copies sold, a peak Tetris shares depending on who is counting. Now Rockstar's next monster, Grand Theft Auto 6, has been lined up as the title with a fighting chance of stealing the crown. The maths, though? Brutal.

To dethrone Mojang's blocky behemoth and join the Tetris tier as the best-selling game ever made, analysts reckon GTA 6 will need to shift north of 350 million copies across its lifetime. Roughly 100 million more than GTA 5 has managed across 13 years of relentless selling.

Let's lay out where GTA 5 sits today, because the predecessor sets the bar. Per Statista's latest figures, GTA 5 has now passed 215 million copies sold since its 2013 launch. In 2020 alone, seven years after release, the game still managed 20 million sales. Twenty million. In a single year. Most AAA studios would commit unspeakable acts for half those numbers. Hundreds of thousands of copies still move every quarter, and Rockstar's poster boy holds multiple Guinness World Records for entertainment sales and revenue.

Here's the wrinkle, though. Despite all those years, despite all those re-releases on every console going, GTA 5 has not closed the gap with Minecraft. Around 100 million copies still separate them. The question becomes whether GTA 6 has the runway to do what its older sibling never quite managed.

The platform problem

This is where the dream starts bumping into reality.

GTA 6 launches on 19 November 2026, and on day one you will only find it on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. PC is following at some unconfirmed later date, with no Switch 2 release, no mobile port, no nothing else. Minecraft? Plays everywhere. Phone, tablet, school Chromebook, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, your nan's fridge if Mojang fancied porting it.

The current next-gen install base sits at roughly 35 million Xbox Series X/S consoles and 92 million PS5s, putting the total addressable market at about 127 million households at launch. Sounds enormous until you remember Minecraft has been quietly selling to anyone with a screen since 2009.

Day-one ambitions

The early forecasts are still wild. Experts expect GTA 6 to push past 25 million copies on launch day, with Statista pinning first-year revenue north of $3 billion for Take-Two Interactive. DFC Intelligence has gone harder, projecting 40 million units in year one and 100 million sales by 2030, doubling GTA 5's launch performance.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick described the surrounding expectations as "terrifying" in a recent interview, adding the studio wants to deliver "something that's never been experienced before." The pressure is real, and so is the appetite. GTA 5's launch made $800 million in its first day. GTA 6 looks set to dwarf those figures, presuming the November date holds, which Take-Two has reaffirmed publicly on multiple occasions.

So, is Minecraft safe?

For now, yes. Likely.

Lifetime sales of GTA 6 hinge on too many variables to predict cleanly. The PC release, whenever Rockstar pulls the trigger, will pull in another wave of buyers. A potential PS6 and next-gen Xbox port a few years down the line, following the GTA 5 playbook, sets up another sales bump. GTA Online's spiritual successor will keep dangling new content for years. And don't forget Rockstar's habit of putting their flagship games into permanent rotation, the way GTA 5 has been re-released on near enough every console generation since the PS3.

Minecraft has not stopped selling either, mind. Mojang still shifts millions of copies a year off the back of mobile alone, with the 2025 film adaptation pulling another wave of newcomers into the game.

For GTA 6 to overtake the block-building giant, you are looking at a 10-year-plus marathon. Give or take. GTA 5 took roughly 13 years to hit its current tally, so the timeline tracks. Platform limits are the genuine handicap, though. Without a mobile or Switch version pulling in casual players, GTA 6 has to do its damage with the hardcore console and PC crowd alone.

My honest take? Plausible. Far from guaranteed, but plausible. If anyone is overtaking Minecraft from here, all signs point to Rockstar's next juggernaut being the one to do it. Whether the moment lands by 2030, 2035, or never is a different conversation entirely.

For more on what is brewing with Rockstar's next chapter, our rundown of leaked GTA 6 features is worth a look.