Take-Two says it's announcing an "exciting new franchise" later this month
As GTA 5 surpasses 150m sales.
Publisher Take-Two says it'll be announcing an "exciting new franchise" later this month with a release planned before the end of the current fiscal year in March 2022.
The news (as spotted by VGC) comes via Take-Two's Q1 2022 earnings call and follows pre-E3 leaks earlier this year - corroborated by VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb - revealing two new unannounced games from the publisher.
Mafia 3 studio Hangar 13 is said to be working on a title described as "Cthulhu meets Saints Row" while XCOM developer Firaxis is reportedly creating a Marvel-themed turn-based strategy game. And while Take-Two offered no hint as to nature of its "new franchise" in its earnings call, this month's Gamescom digital event seems a likely candidate for a full reveal.
Elsewhere in its earnings presentation, Take-Two confirmed Grand Theft Auto 5 has now sold more than 150m copies worldwide, meaning it's managed to shift another 10m copies since the publisher revealed the game's previous global sales tally back in February this year. It also provided some additional context for those numbers, noting the GTA series as a whole has shifted 360m copies - meaning GTA 5 now accounts for 40% of all sales.
That number is likely to continue climbing too, given that Rockstar is poised to launch an "expanded and enhanced" version of Grand Theft Auto 5 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 11th November - although it'll be interesting to see how GTA Online's standalone release on the same day affects GTA 5's growth trajectory in the long-term.
In addition to its latest GTA 5 update, Take-Two also shared numbers for some of its other mega-selling titles. Red Dead Redemption 2, for instance, has now sold 60m units worldwide (Take-Two calls it the "second best-selling title in US in past three years based on dollar sales"), while Borderlands 3 has now amassed 13m sales.
And if you're curious about franchises, the Bioshock series has now sold a combined total of 38 million units, Sid Meier's Civilization is at 58m units, and the NBA 2K series sits at 112m units.