How Many GTA Players Died Waiting for GTA 6?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LybCc1o-eSE&feature=youtu.be
Sources
Statista – GTA V Sales: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247955/gta-v-unit-sales-worldwide-total/?srsltid=AfmBOoq_a5a53koccYIueZSUf7zPjmZmpJwGINMJVpI-r94_GPrqwQp_
ESA 2025 Player Survey: https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/PoP-2025-v10-web-spreads.pdf
U.S. Social Security Actuarial Life Table: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6_2017_TR2020.html
Quantic Foundry – Female Gamers by Genre: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
We first need to decide who counts as a GTA player waiting for GTA VI. We're just going to focus on the one figure we actually know: GTA V has sold around 220 million copies.
We need to take into consideration those who own multiple copies of the game. Let's make a conservative estimate that, on average, each player owns 1.2 copies. Put another way, for every ten GTA players, we'd assume eight own one copy and two own two copies. It's impossible to know the exact figure, but 1.2 copies per player is a conservative working assumption.
So 220 million copies divided by 1.2 gives us around 183 million unique GTA players.
For the purposes of this model, we'll assume someone enters the "waiting for GTA VI" population when they first purchase GTA V.
If we look at Statista we can see sales over 13 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247955/gta-v-unit-sales-worldwide-total/?srsltid=AfmBOoq_a5a53koccYIueZSUf7zPjmZmpJwGINMJVpI-r94_GPrqwQp_
Between September 2013 and January 2015, 40 million copies sold. By November 2016, an additional 20 million had sold. By 2022, six years later, an additional 100 million had sold, and so on.
Because these are cumulative sales, we can subtract each total from the previous one to estimate how many players entered our model each year.
We then divide each year's sales by 1.2 to estimate the number of unique players per year.
Now we know roughly how many people entered the model each year who are then waiting for GTA VI, having purchased GTA V.
The next step is to estimate their ages, because that determines the probability they'll survive long enough to play GTA VI.
Unfortunately, Rockstar has never published the age demographics of GTA V players, so let's use this ESA survey of 24,000 players across 21 countries.
https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/PoP-2025-v10-web-spreads.pdf
Ideally, we'd have the same data from 2013, but the survey from that year doesn't provide a detailed age breakdown. The age profile of gamers has likely changed over the last decade, but without comparable historical data we'll use the current distribution as our baseline.
I set the minimum age at 16 to align with the ESA survey. GTA V is an R-rated game, but for this model I'm assuming 16 year olds are playing it.
I also reduced the proportion of players aged 65+, on the assumption that GTA's audience skews somewhat younger than the overall gaming population, changing this to 5% of the player base and redistributing the remaining 4.9% across the other demographics.
Now we take the estimated number of players entering our model each year and apply the same age distribution to each yearly cohort. I've assumed an additional 5 million GTA V sales in 2026 before the release of GTA VI.
We now have an estimate of how many players entered our "waiting for GTA VI" model each year, broken down by age. One important assumption is that we're using the same age distribution for every year. In reality, that distribution likely changed over time, but without historical data this is the most consistent approach.
So we now know:
• How many people entered our model each year.
• When they entered it.
• Roughly how old they were.
Now we need to estimate the probability that each group survives until GTA VI launches. To do this we need to use a life table. A life (or actuarial) table shows, for each age, the probability that a person of that age will die before their next birthday.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6_2017_TR2020.html
GTA has sold worldwide, but a large proportion of sales come from developed countries, particularly the United States. For that reason, we're going to use U.S. actuarial life tables. The United States is also GTA's biggest market, and the data is among the best publicly available.
A life table starts with a hypothetical group of 100,000 newborns. As people get older, some die, so that number gradually falls.
By age 1, around 538 of the original 100,000 have died. By age 50, around 7,060 males and 4,171 females have died. By age 80, roughly half are still alive.
With this data we can work out the probability that someone dies at any point between entering our model and finally getting their hands on GTA VI. Remember, the player needs to survive from the age they become "waiting for GTA VI" until the game's release.
Not everyone has been waiting since 2013. An 18 year old who first got into GTA in 2022 has only been waiting a few years, and they're a lot more likely to make it to GTA VI than some tired, PC playing millennial who finished GTA V back in 2015.
So to move forward we need to know two things:
• How old someone was when they entered our model.
• How many years they had to survive until GTA VI comes out.
Let's say someone in the 25 to 34 age bracket bought and played GTA V in 2017. Let's pick a midpoint in that bracket and say they are 30 years old. Our 30 year old has to survive another nine years up to the age of 39.
In the 2017 life table, 97,229 of the original 100,000 people are still alive at age 30.
Now, for this calculation we're assuming mortality rates stay the same as they were in 2017. That's not exactly true. In fact, by 2023 (the latest table available) there are 67 fewer people alive at age 30 than in the 2017 table.
Looking at men first. Of the people who made it to age 30, what proportion also made it to age 39?
Well, 97,229 of the original 100,000 are still alive at age 30.
By age 39, 95,417 of those original 100,000 are still alive.
So to turn that into a survival probability, we divide 95,417 by 97,229, which gives us 0.9814, or 98.14%.
In other words, 98.14% of people who reached age 30 survived to age 39.
Another way to look at it is the probability of dying. If there's a 98.14% chance of surviving, then 1.86% will die before reaching age 39.
For women, 98,540 of the original 100,000 are still alive at age 30, and 97,619 are still alive at age 39. Dividing 97,619 by 98,540 gives us 99.07%, meaning 99.07% of women who reached age 30 survived to age 39. Women have a higher survival rate than men.
So far we've kept male and female players separate, but now we need to combine them to come up with a final estimate.
Unfortunately, there are no official figures for the gender split of GTA V players. The ESA reports that 41% of gamers are female, but that's across the entire games industry. Research from Quantic Foundry suggests that around 18.5% of players of action adventure games are female.
https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
GTA V could arguably fit into other genres, such as open world, but action adventure feels like the closest match. So for this model, we'll assume that 18% of players are female and 82% are male.
In other words, we're taking the male and female probabilities, weighting them by our estimated player base, and using that to calculate one overall probability of dying for each age group of players.
We now have all the data we need to make an estimate of player deaths since 2013.
For every group of players in our model, we take the number of players and multiply it by their estimated probability of dying before the game's release. We repeat that calculation for every age group, for every year people entered the model, and then add all of those estimates together.
So what are the results?
Using the baseline assumptions, the model estimates 6.81 million players died waiting for GTA VI.
If we use a more conservative age distribution, that falls to 5.3 million.
If we also assume only 150 million players were actually waiting for GTA VI, the estimate falls further to 4.36 million.
Here is the likelihood of death within each age range.
If we calculate based on the intended release date for GTA VI, autumn 2025, and compare that to the actual release date of November 19th, 2026, we can estimate the additional deaths associated with the extra year of waiting created by the delay. Rockstar pushed the game back twice, adding roughly a year onto the wait for everyone who was already a fan. Running that difference through the more conservative estimate, we get approximately 880,000 players who were alive in autumn 2025, waiting for GTA VI, and won't make it to November 2026.
Finally, let's take that mid range result of 5.3 million. Assuming all those people would have purchased GTA VI, that's approximately $424 million in foregone sales.