GTA Online – the new update drops next week and six months after the last one (Picture: Rockstar)

As Take-Two reports that the GTA series isn’t making as much money as it used to, a new and chunky expansion is announced for GTA Online.

No one quite knows what Rockstar’s plans are for Grand Theft Auto Online once Grand Theft Auto 6 launches. Will it continue as normal? Will it be replaced with GTA Online 2? The latter seems likely given old comments by publisher Take-Two and purported evidence of a sequel’s existence, but no one knows for sure.

In the meantime, as fans go stir crazy over the lack of GTA 6 updates, GTA Online continues to receive new updates, with the latest arriving next week on Tuesday, June 13.

Subtitled San Andreas Mercenaries, aside from adding aircraft themed content it will introduce some highly requested features, including the most important demand of all… a toggle for sprinting.

Sprinting in GTA Online previously required you to rapidly press a button and it’s been like that for nearly a decade, and so has long been a source of fan complaints. Finally, Rockstar will make it so you can simply hold down the button instead.

That’s obviously not the main attraction of the update. Rockstar has yet to share any gameplay footage or a trailer for San Andreas Mercenaries, but it sounds like there’ll be a heavy focus on aircraft as you team up with elite pilots to take on one of the game’s main enemy factions, Merryweather Security.

‘Expert aircraft mechanic and ace pilot Charlie Reed is putting together a squadron of proficient aviators and guns-for-hire known only as the Los Santos Angels to take on new lucrative private work, stealing sensitive data from server farms, conducting raids, and dropping explosive payloads on high-value targets across the state,’ reads a description on Rockstar’s website.

The accompanying key art brings to mind Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat games, although it remains to be seen if you’ll be getting into intense dogfights during the expansion.

It’ll also bring some much-needed updates to the aircraft hanger (which was introduced in 2017) and the recently introduced Avenger aircraft. For instance, you’ll be able to customise your Avenger straight from the hangar and you won’t even need a hangar property to store it.

This update comes alongside news of the Grand Theft Auto franchise’s revenue dropping. A Take-Two fiscal report spotted and shared by TweakTown reveals that GTA earnings went down by $300 million (approximately £242 million) during the 2023 fiscal year (which ended this past March).

This can obviously be attributed to the lack of any wholly new GTA games (it’s been over 10 years since Grand Theft Auto 5) and the lack of major updates for GTA Online, with the last one – Los Santos Drug Wars – launching six months ago now.

While this will likely encourage Take-Two to get GTA 6 out either next year or 2025 (as it’s already hinted), the company’s hardly going to start struggling. GTA may be making less money than usual but Zynga (which Take-Two bought last year) and its mobile games are off-setting those losses.

Take-Two made $5.349 billion (about £4.3 billion) in net revenue for the 2023 fiscal year, with Zynga making $2.159 billion (roughly £1.7 billion) – about 40% – of that total.

Grand Theft Auto Online is available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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As Take-Two reports that the GTA series isn’t making as much money as it used to, a new and chunky expansion is announced for GTA Online.