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The long-awaited release of the latest Grand Theft Auto game is set to be the biggest entertainment launch of 2025, generating a projected $3bn in its first year, making it a bright spot in an otherwise lacklustre video game market.

Grand Theft Auto VI, which publisher Take-Two Interactive is set to release in the autumn on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, is likely to exceed $1bn in pre-orders before it even becomes available, according to analysts at DFC Intelligence, a video games research group.

Total revenues from GTA VI’s first 12 months after release are expected to reach $3.2bn, DFC predicts, double its 2013 predecessor. Such a success would far outstrip 2024’s biggest films Inside Out 2, which grossed $1.7bn globally according to Box Office Mojo, and Deadpool & Wolverine, which has taken $1.3bn.

“I never claim victory before it occurs,” Take-Two’s chief executive Strauss Zelnick told the Financial Times. “That said, I think [GTA’s developer] Rockstar Games will once again deliver something absolutely phenomenal . . . Certainly the anticipation is high.”

Gamers have been waiting more than a decade for the latest in the cinematic action game series, which will feature a Bonnie and Clyde-style criminal couple rampaging around Vice City. The first GTA VI trailer, released in December 2023, has been viewed more than 225mn times on YouTube.

“We think it’s going to be one of the biggest entertainment launches in history, not just in games but for all of media,” said Yoshio Osaki, chief executive of games-focused IDG Consulting. “The pent-up demand is greater than anything we’ve seen before.”

However, GTA VI will be an outlier in a games industry that is still struggling to recover from a protracted slump, leading to lay-offs at Sony and Microsoft’s gaming units, as well as top publishers including Take-Two, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. More than 33,000 people have lost their jobs since 2022, according to tracking site Games Industry Layoffs, including almost 15,000 in 2024 alone.

Zelnick conceded he was “a bit surprised by the reduction in demand” from players that started in 2022, as post-pandemic consumers turned off their screens and returned to live, in-person events. “All of us in the industry had to do some restructuring,” he said. “We too got a little bit ahead of ourselves in terms of growth expectations.”

Now, the Take-Two chief believes growth is starting to accelerate again.

“It’s way too early to believe that this [console] generation is maturing or has reached its apex,” Zelnick said. “You’re seeing more consumer demand broadly. And the [games] industry, frankly led by us, has an amazing release schedule coming in 2025 and beyond . . . A hit coming from one company tends to benefit the entire industry.”

Not everyone is so optimistic. Ampere Analysis, a consultancy, forecasts that consumer spending on games content and services will increase just 2.2 per cent in 2025 to $195bn. That year-on-year growth rate is slightly higher than Ampere’s estimate of 1.4 per cent in 2024 and better than the 4.8 per cent drop between 2021’s pandemic peak and 2022’s lockdown easing.

Nonetheless, it pales in comparison with the industry’s huge expansion in the previous decade: games content spending doubled from $95bn in 2015 to $191bn in 2021, according to Ampere.

“We’ve grown so well in the last 25 years that it feels like none of us knows how to work in a non-growing industry,” said Nicholas Lovell, a games designer and consultant. “We are now a mature business . . . There is no funding and the market is oversaturated [with new games].”

Even an outsized hit such as GTA or the anticipated debut of Nintendo’s new console will not be enough to return the games industry’s growth rate to its former pace, according to Matthew Ball, a tech investor and author of The Metaverse.

“The largest structural problem faced by the industry is a reduction in time played per player and the number of players,” Ball said. That is especially true in the US, where video apps like TikTok have been attracting smartphone users away from games, he said. At the same time, he added, “the global market for mobile gamers is no longer growing”.

The slowdown in the smartphone market has deprived the industry of one of several huge growth drivers over the past decade, alongside the rise of social games such as Roblox and Among Us, and new business models such as Fortnite’s “battle pass” subscription that unlocks more virtual goods as players progress.

“Three years [after the pandemic], the biggest games are as big as they were, there are no bigger games and most of the others have shrunk,” said Ball. “Nearly all of the major studios are contending with the fact that they believed there would be many millions of players more and that audiences would be trying new games.”

While the most popular games and franchises — such as Fortnite, football simulator EA Sports FC and Microsoft’s Call of Duty — continue to be extremely lucrative for their creators, they are not growing at the pace they were a few years ago.

At the same time, it is getting ever harder for new releases to lure players away from their tried-and-tested favourites, especially as new content is now regularly added to the biggest games all year round.

“Publishers are banking on the fact that as these games become more evergreen, it’s better to bet bigger on a tried-and-tested [intellectual property] and have more longevity, with live services and content updates,” said Osaki.

One of those enduring hits is GTA V, which has sold more than 205mn copies to date, with an online multiplayer version that continues to attract millions of players each month. That gives Take-Two a strong base on which to launch the new game.

The launch of GTA Online was “pretty bumpy”, Zelnick recalled, initially crashing under high player demand. “One of the things Rockstar has done in the last eight years is vastly improve the technical underpinnings of everything we do,” he said. “We don’t tend to have those kinds of challenges any more.”

Unlike annual franchises such as Call of Duty or EA Sports FC, the long gap between GTA’s releases makes them an extraordinary event for gamers. “Nobody has managed to do what GTA does as well as GTA does,” said Lovell.

But that comes at a huge cost, with estimates for its development costs running from the high hundreds of millions to as much as $2bn, including post-launch content updates. “It might be the last hurrah of that way of doing business,” Lovell said. “Very few people will be able to make that kind of bet on that kind of property.