Yesterday, hacker group ShinyHunters made good on their threat to release data stolen from Grand Theft Auto VI developers Rockstar Games by way of a third-party service. Rockstar don’t seem bothered by the leak, with one representative calling it “a limited amount of non-material company information”, and the alleged secret titbits now in circulation certainly aren’t on the same scale as the infamous 2022 leak of WIP footage from GTA 6. Still, there are some interesting gobbets in there. One is that Rockstar’s cashcow GTA Online makes a lot less money from microtransactions on PC, despite its steady following on services like Steam.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that GTA Online makes a lot of money in general. As passed along by Kotaku – who say they’ve verified that the numbers are from the alleged leaked files, but not been able to confirm the latter’s authenticity with Rockstar – GTA Online made $9,592,109 a week across September 2025 to April 2026. Nine million dollars a week! Why, you could buy almost all the DLC for a Paradox grand strategy game with that!
Of the total, $8,245,974 was from console, with PlayStation platforms accounting for the lion’s share – PS5 players paid out $4,486,346 and PS4 players, $973,308. That’s around twice the $2,786,320 Rockstar earned from Xbox Series X and Xbox One players. And it is, er, one point four zillion times the $264,273 they got from PC.
We don’t tend to do sales number stories on RPS, because it’s playing sports commentator for large corporations and we do not give a shit which particular demon space octopus eats the most human souls (as long as it’s not the Maw). In this case, though, the gap in alleged returns caught my eye.
Rockstar tend to be elusive about exact platform sales divisions, but GTA appears plenty popular on PC. GTA V Legacy is 13th on the Steam most played as of writing, and PC is where all the cool mods and role-playing communities live, notwithstanding Sony and Microsoft’s efforts to transform their living room monoliths into de facto desktops with a more restrictive OS. No less than Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive, observed last year that PC ports can account for over 40% of overall sales, adding that “we have seen PC become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business”.
All of which renders Rockstar’s refusal to date GTA 6 for PC a little mysterious, but the alleged leaked microtransaction numbers make an unambiguous case for prioritising consoles and especially, PlayStation.
In other news, Rockstar are right in the middle of a legal fight with ousted GTA 6 developers amid allegations of union-busting and misconduct. They also recently laid off their head of AI among other staffers, following lukewarm sentiments from Zelnick about generative AI in general.
