Rockstar Games’ hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 which was set to release in Early 2025 is very likely going to get delayed into Late/Fall 2025 with slight chances of a 2026 release also on the table. The GTA 6 delay news was reported by Zack Zwiezen from Kotaku.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to be one of the best top-selling games following years of hype and wait since the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 in 2013 which is currently the second best-selling game behind only Minecraft. Rockstar’s games have always been technical marvels. The studio’s ideology is centered around selling the ‘perfect’ product to fans, with their releases setting industry benchmarks for other developers to try to reach. However, all this requires time and budget spread over multiple years of development and AAA development budgets are only going to get larger with time, due to longer development cycles and the increasing demand for technical showcases.
Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in early development since 2014 with Rockstar’s primary focus shifting towards it only after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 probably. Rockstar first mentioned that the development of the game was well underway during February 2022 without a proper announcement of the game and the studio suffered a massive data breach shortly after in September, with multiple in-development gameplay leaks uploaded online.
Jason Schreier of Bloomberg has confirmed that GTA 6’s protagonists will be akin to Bonnie and Clyde and the game will be primarily set in Vice City. Recently, he reported that Rockstar has called back their employees to work in the office for at least 5 days a week starting April citing ‘productivity and security reasons’. Kotaku’s article mentioning the GTA 6 delay explained that the decision was partially taken to avoid a delay in the expected launch period of Early 2025.
While Rockstar is still keeping an Early 2025 launch window as their goal, Kotaku cites sources who believe that a Fall 2025 is far more likely as development on the title is falling behind. Interestingly, a 2026 release window is also on the table as a ‘fallback’ option. While Rockstar has not officially commented on this news, GTA 6 getting delayed was expected considering recent development times of similar AAA games and the Grand Theft Auto games’ behemoth of a size requiring even more polish.
As more details regarding the game are revealed, EsportsNext will have you covered!
Meanwhile, you can read our Everything We Know So Far article on GTA 6 to catch up on every detail we knew about it before GTA 6 was delayed.
