How big would GTA VI need to be to make the stock go up 50%?

The market is already certainly counting in GTA VI into Take-Two Interactive's stock price.

Here's what I mean. Strip out GTA VI and Take-Two is a company earning roughly $3.80 a share from NBA 2K, Zynga, and a 13-year-old GTA V.

If we assume we're paying a fair 22x for that and you get about $84 a share. The stock trades at $243. Everything above $84, call it $160 a share, is the market pre-paying for GTA VI.

Here's the part that surprised me when I built the model: the game itself can't fill that hole. Say GTA VI sells 60 million copies in year one at $84 blended, nearly double what GTA V did in its first year. That's about $5 billion of one-time bookings, worth maybe $11 a share after margins and taxes. A rounding error against $160.

So! The entire bull case is GTA VI Online. For the stock to hit the Street-high $368 target at a multiple I'd actually pay, the online mode needs to become a $5 billion a year recurring business.

This can only be done with recurring revenue through a robust online platform.

Unfortunately we're lacking details on this so far from the Company -- although they have hinted there WILL be a GTA online

Here's the entire public record on it, and it is thin:

• GTA VI ships November 19 as single-player only. No online mode announced. No date.

• Strauss Zelnick has hinted the wait for online will be shorter than the gap between GTA V and GTA Online. That gap was two weeks. But a hint is not a commitment.

• Every preorder includes a free month of GTA+, Rockstar's subscription service. That's the one confirmed recurring hook, and it tells you the funnel is already being loaded.

• Across a decade of earnings calls, management has never once described what the GTA VI online mode actually is.

I don't like that the market has assigned roughly $30 billion of value to a product the company has never described.

So how hard would it be to get $5 billion a year in recurring business?

GTA Online, right now, does about $500 million a year from 20 million monthly players. That's $25 per player per year. Fortnite, the most successful live-service game in history, peaked around $5.1 billion in 2018 and has since faded to under $2 billion. Roblox needed a full decade of compounding an entire platform to reach $4.4 billion in bookings, and it still loses money on a GAAP basis.

So the bar is this: GTA VI Online has to beat the best year the best game ever had. And then hold it, year after year, which not even Fortnite managed to do.

To be fair to the bulls, if anyone on earth can clear that bar, it's Rockstar. GTA V has sold 230 million units and moved roughly 15 million copies last year, twelve years after launch. Recurring spend is already 78% of Take-Two's bookings. And today's GTA Online was improvised after launch on 2013 technology. An online mode designed for monetization from day one could plausibly do multiples of $500 million. The bulls aren't crazy. They're just paying full price today for the greatest live-service launch in history, before the company has said a single word about it.

And that's exactly why I'm pausing my research on Take-Two here. Not because the business is weak. It's arguably the strongest catalog in gaming. I'm pausing because the one variable that decides whether this stock is worth $243 or $368 hasn't been revealed yet, and no amount of modeling on my end changes that.