The Aug. 27 Grand Theft Auto 6 showcase on Netflix has come and gone, and with it came a deluge of new information about the most anticipated video game in years. We learned the map in GTA 6 is roughly three times the size of the map in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is a pretty astonishing data point. Rockstar Games also revealed that Jason and Lucia’s romance is entirely optional; you can choose to keep the pair platonic for your entire playthrough.
There’s still one thing we don’t know: What does the online side of the game look like? In typically secretive fashion, Rockstar has not even confirmed that there will be an online component to GTA 6. On the contrary, when preorders went live back in June, the company stressed that “GTA 6 is a single-player experience.” Still, that hasn’t stopped observers from assuming Rockstar’s got something in the works.
That’s because we know that GTA Online in its present form is both hugely popular and a reliable money-maker for Rockstar. According to an April hack of the company’s financial data, GTA Online was still pulling in an average of $1.3 million per day between September 2025 and April 2026. Even if GTA 6 sells 50 million copies in a week, the company isn’t planning to let that revenue stream just wither and die.
There are a few distinct possibilities: Rockstar launches an all-new GTA Online that’s set in the world of GTA 6, content from GTA 6 will be integrated into the existing GTA Online, or GTA Online will continue as a spin-off of GTA 5 only and have no crossover at all with GTA 6. Let’s dive a little deeper into those possibilities:
Rockstar reveals an all-new GTA Online
This is the more exciting but less plausible option. We know that Rockstar is both wildly ambitious and notoriously secretive, and the budget for GTA 6 is rumored to be in the billions. Maybe they’ve been building this new and improved GTAO alongside the base game, and that’s what the former Read Dead Online team has been working on since Rockstar sunsetted the game back in July 2022.
Does that mean Rockstar has been cooking up a new-gen online sandbox to rival Fortnite and Minecraft alongside the most anticipated single-player game of all time? If so, that would be very cool. And they could charge a lot of money for it. But reinventing two genres at once — the single-player blockbuster and the live-service experience — is a pretty tall order, even for a company as accomplished as Rockstar. Honestly, the more I think about it, the less likely it seems. So let’s explore the other option.
Rockstar integrates GTA 6 content into the existing GTA Online
We know that the current iteration of GTA Online is alive and thriving to the tune of $1.3 million per day. Its Steam concurrent player numbers are consistently in the mid-to-high five figures. That hefty playerbase is a big source of passive income that Rockstar is not going to want to lose. But pushing players into a new game that may require new hardware probably would alienate a significant chunk of them, especially when the audience seem to like the old game just fine. That’s especially true at a time when console and component prices are consistently going up.
The current GTAO runs on most current and past-gen hardware, with the exception of Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. But GTA 6 (presumably) uses a more advanced version of Rockstar’s bespoke graphics engine, and thus far the studio has only announced the game will launch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. We still haven’t heard any official word on a PC release, let alone past-gen ports. Keeping GTA Online in its current form would allow Rockstar to give players on PS4, Xbox One, and PC access to some kind of GTA 6 content as soon as possible — potentially without even purchasing the base game, let alone a new console.
There is absolutely no reason to suspect that any of this GTA 6 content would be “free” or even “cheap.” A standalone copy of GTA Online (without GTA 5) currently retails for between $10 and $20 depending on the day and the retailer, though the game is further monetized through microtransactions in the form of Shark Cards and GTA+ subscriptions. Rockstar has a fine line to walk here, though. Adding fresh content tied to GTA 6 could get more people playing Online and potentially expand the reach of what promises to be a massive pop-culture moment. But any content that’s too duplicative risks cannibalizing sales of the new game, while mere cosmetic additions would be slammed as a lazy cash grab.
An all-new version of GTA Online runs the risk of being a walled garden, but keeping the old version alive circumvents that. This option is far less exciting from a creative standpoint, but it does feel like the safer bet. Heck, the team wouldn’t even need to integrate a new Vice City map right away. Maybe Jason and Lucia go on a vacation in Los Santos, and wacky crimes ensue.
GTA Online won’t cross over with GTA 6 anytime soon
If you’d asked me a couple of months ago, before the Aug. 27 Netflix extended look, I would have said there’s no way in hell Rockstar doesn’t have some kind of robust online component for GTA 6. But now, roughly three months out from that Nov. 19 release date, we still haven’t heard anything. Official previews from IGN, the New York Times, and a variety of streamers and content creators have all had nothing say about the future of GTA Online. While it does seem odd that Rockstar has done so little to keep all those lucrative and loyal GTAO players sweet, it’s seeming more and more likely that Rockstar’s focus will be entirely on the single-player experience for the foreseeable future.
