GTA 6 on PC: the leaked numbers say 3%, Take-Two's own boss says 50%

Grand Theft Auto VI goes on sale on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on 19 November with no PC version announced, and the most quoted explanation for that is a number Rockstar never published: PC accounts for about 3% of what GTA Online takes in each week, against roughly 97% from consoles. The figure is real in the sense that it comes from a real dataset. That dataset was stolen, Rockstar has never confirmed a line of it, and the conclusion drawn from it collapses the moment you ask what it counts.

It is worth taking seriously anyway, because it is the only platform-level evidence about Rockstar's business that anyone outside the company has. This site has written three times that no PC version has been announced and that every explanation offered for its absence is inference. This is the strongest version of that inference. It is still inference, and it sits directly against a larger number that Take-Two's chief executive said out loud, on the record, with his name on it.

Where the 3% comes from

Rockstar confirmed that a breach happened and characterised it as narrowly as a company can. Its statement said a limited amount of non-material company information had been accessed in connection with a third-party data breach, and that there was no impact on its players. That is an acknowledgement of an incident. It is not a confirmation of a single figure inside it, and Rockstar has never commented on the numbers themselves.

What the table actually says, and how reliably

The per-platform rows are the part being quoted and the part that has travelled worst. As relayed, the dataset covers roughly seven months — reported as 9 September 2025 to 24 March 2026 — and gives weekly averages:

Against a weekly total variously relayed as $8.4 million or $9.6 million, PC works out at 2.8% to 3.1%. Both round to "about 3%", so the headline survives; the precision does not.

Two warnings about those numbers. The first is that the relays disagree with each other by more than a million dollars a week on the total, which is a large disagreement about a small set of rows. The second is sharper: one widely shared version of the table prints PC's user count as its revenue and its revenue as its user count — PC at "$890K revenue / 264K users", exactly reversed. A reader who met the figures there has them backwards, and the error is invisible unless you have both versions side by side.

The one further detail worth keeping is that a reported 4% of active players generate almost all of GTA Online's income. That is the shape of a live service: not a population spending a little, a small group spending a great deal.

The other number, which nobody set beside it

Strauss Zelnick, on the record, as Take-Two's chief executive:

When he arrived at Take-Two in 2007, PC accounted for roughly 5% of NBA 2K's sales volume. For a big title today, PC can be 45 to 50%.

That figure is already on this site, in what was actually said at the shareholder meeting, where it was described as the strongest available argument that GTA VI reaches PC eventually — because it is a number rather than a posture.

So the public record now contains two figures about PC and Take-Two:

Neither is wrong. They are answers to different questions, and the entire "97% explains it" argument depends on nobody noticing which question was asked.

Why 3% cannot carry the weight put on it

Bookings are not units. The leaked figure measures microtransaction spending inside GTA Online — Shark Cards and what they buy. It is silent on how many copies of a game any platform sells. A platform can be a poor market for in-game currency and an excellent market for a one-off £65 purchase, and PC has historically been exactly that: a place where games sell and live-service grinding sells badly.

GTA VI is not being sold as a live service. Rob Nelson's answer on microtransactions in the shipping game was a single word, and the word was no. That answer rests on one word said in a podcast Rockstar never published, so it is thinner than it is usually reported as being — but it is the only answer on the record, and nothing has contradicted it. If it holds, then the revenue line the leak measures does not exist in GTA VI at launch at all, and a statistic about it explains nothing about where GTA VI is sold.

The sample is eleven years old. The population being measured is whoever was still buying Shark Cards on PC between September 2025 and March 2026, in a game released in 2013 that has been modded, cheated and server-browsed into something quite unlike the console version. That is not a sample of the people who would buy GTA VI on PC in 2027. It is a sample of the people who did not leave GTA Online.

And a successor is not announced. There is no GTA VI online mode — no mode, no date, no scope. The commercial model the 3% describes has not been confirmed to exist in this game in any form, on any platform.

What Rockstar and Take-Two have actually said about why PC waits

Nothing, from Rockstar. Not a reason, not a placeholder, not a date.

From Take-Two there is one answer, and it is not a revenue answer. Zelnick has attributed the console-first decision to Rockstar serving "the core consumer" first, and has explicitly denied that a PlayStation exclusivity arrangement is behind it. That is the only stated reason in existence, it comes from the publisher rather than from a dataset, and it says nothing about platform revenue share.

Set against that, the other live claim about PC timing points the opposite way from the 3%. On 13 October, GamesBeat reported that Rockstar is targeting a PC release in the first quarter of 2027, citing four anonymous sources. A company that regarded PC as a 3% platform would not be two to four months behind on it. One of those two stories is wrong, and the 97% figure is being used to support the slower one while the only dated report says the opposite.

Where this data came from, which is not a footnote

The 3% is not a disclosure. It is the product of an extortion attempt: a ransom demanded, refused, and the files published in retaliation. Rockstar is the victim in that sequence, and the figures exist in public only because a crime did.

An arrest followed. In late September the Dutch National Police confirmed that a 24-year-old man in Amsterdam had been arrested; the FBI alleges he is one of ShinyHunters' leaders and was likely involved in the Rockstar breach, and ShinyHunters denies he is associated with the group. Nobody has been convicted, the attribution is contested, and this site is not naming him.

That matters for how much the numbers are worth, not only for how they were got. Nobody has audited the files. Kotaku's verification was that people who had seen the data agreed on what it contained — which establishes that a real dataset circulated, not that every figure derived from it since has been read correctly. The transposed PC row above is the proof of exactly that distinction.

This is a different matter from the separate hunt for the person leaking GTA VI footage, which concerns the game rather than the company's finances.

What is not confirmed

What would actually settle it

An announcement, and nothing short of one. Failing that, the next genuine datapoint is Take-Two's second-quarter results on 9 November, where somebody will ask about PC and will be answered in the same language as every previous time — that quarter contains no GTA VI money either way.

Until then the honest reading is narrow and worth holding: a stolen spreadsheet shows that PC players spend little inside an eleven-year-old online game. That is probably true. It is not a reason, it is not a plan, and it is not evidence about a single-player game that has not shipped.

A note on sourcing

Rockstar's own site and most of the games press do not resolve from where this was written, so nothing below was read first-hand — not the Kotaku reports, not the GamesRadar headline, not the VGC piece, and not the original forum post carrying the per-platform table. Every figure above is taken from reporting of them. The outlets relayed are Kotaku for the dump and its verification and for the arrest, VGC for the share price, and GamesRadar for the 97/3 framing applied to the PC question. Where relays disagree — on the weekly total, and on which of PC's two numbers is which — both versions are printed above rather than one being chosen. Zelnick's figures and quotations are as recorded on this site from the shareholder meeting of 17 September 2026.