Take-Two CEO Calls GTA 6 Piracy “a Fact of Life” Two Weeks Before Launch

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says piracy is “a fact of life” and that the publisher will answer it with legal and technical work if GTA 6 ends up pirated. He made the remarks during an interview at the WSJ Tech: California conference, which Notebookcheck places in Napa on 4 November, less than two weeks before GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on 19 November. The comments were first picked up by MP1st, which links to the Wall Street Journal interview.

The question that prompted the answer wasn’t about GTA 6 itself. The interviewer asked about someone who had recreated PlayStation 4 games on Roblox using AI tools, and how worried Take-Two is about that. Zelnick joked that he worries about everything all the time despite being laid-back, then widened the lens to his own career. In film, he said, the industry figured 10-20% of its business was pirated at any given time. In music, where he worked from 1994 to 2000, he’d argue that by the mid-2000s about 80% of the market was pirated, a figure he says is “way back down again”.

His case for games is that they’re harder to pirate than a song or a film. File size and complexity help, and so do servers: Zelnick said Take-Two’s games need a connection to its servers for a good experience, so pirates would have to run competing servers of their own. The result, he said, “won’t be a great experience”, though he added that it’s “not nothing”. He didn’t wave the problem away, either. “It’s not been a non-issue,” Zelnick said, and he called for vigilance because piracy will keep being an issue for the business.

Zelnick didn’t mention jailbreaks or name any platforms, and neither Take-Two nor Rockstar has said what anti-piracy protections GTA 6 will use at launch. That leaves the “legal and technical work” line as a statement of intent. The legal half is already running, though. PC Gamer reports that Take-Two subpoenaed Discord for user information about the pre-launch leaks, and that a court has since granted the request. That came after the party behind the leaks threatened to release the entire build, a standoff we covered when CYBERLEEK threatened to publish the full build.

The PS5 question

The technical half is more speculative. Notebookcheck reports that PlayStation Network database listings show GTA 6 requiring PS5 firmware 14.22, which would keep it off consoles running the public Relapse jailbreak. According to the same report, that exploit tops out at firmware 13.60, and neither Rockstar nor Sony has confirmed the requirement. MP1st separately notes that Sony has been pushing security updates to the PS5 ahead of launch.

GTA 6’s format also plays a part. The game ships without a disc, and boxed copies include a digital download code, which fits Zelnick’s earlier argument that discs “don’t really make sense for the consumer”. Notebookcheck says digital preloads start on 10 November and need up to 212 GB of free space, while boxed editions arrive on 12 November and the game unlocks on 19 November.

PC is the bigger unknown

GTA 6 is console-only at launch, and Rockstar hasn’t announced a PC version. MP1st points to a rumour of a Q1 2027 PC window and expects the open nature of the platform to make piracy harder to contain there. That’s the outlet’s read, not anything Take-Two has said. Zelnick has already laid out why the publisher is taking a console-first approach, so the piracy debate is likely to resurface when a PC date does arrive.

For players in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the practical advice is the dull one: buy from your console’s official store and skip anything claiming to be an early or cracked build. If you’re still deciding which edition to pick up, we’ve broken down the Standard and Ultimate Edition prices.