It’s safe to say that Grand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated video games in history – around the world, millions of gamers are waiting for at least some information about the project, the next leaked screenshot, video and, of course, the release. But, if you believe the information from Kotaku, there is a huge chance that the project will have to wait even longer than the publisher originally promised. According to the resource, Rockstar Games is far behind the development schedule for the new title and may postpone the launch of GTA 6 from 2025 to 2026 – and we are only talking about the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles, since they will receive the new blockbuster first. Accordingly, we can assume that the launch on PC will be delayed by another year, that is, to 2027.
Journalists also point out that in February of this year, representatives of Bloomberg, citing their anonymous sources, reported that Rockstar Games ordered its employees to return to a five-day work week within the office – starting in April. This greatly upset many employees because they had previously worked remotely and were forced to either quit or move closer to the office. And although these measures may be related, among other things, to increasing the level of security of the project (builds, plot and screenshots had already been leaked – all this was done during the development process), in fact, anonymous sources told Kotaku that development began to fall far behind schedule.
In order to mitigate this problem and try to meet the deadline (probably early 2025), the publisher decided to return developers to the offices – productivity is higher there. At the same time, many Western experts note that nothing good will come of this – most often, when development lags behind and the publisher pushes the team to specific deadlines, the result is a complete failure. This happened with Cyberpunk 2077, for example, when the project needed to be in development for another year, but because of the promised deadlines, the product was released in terrible shape. Now there is a chance that GTA 6 will suffer the same fate, because it is a very complex project with a huge budget and a lot of new mechanics.
Rockstar Games itself does not comment on the situation in any way – this is quite in the spirit of the company. Probably, the official news about the postponement of the game, which has been awaited for more than ten years, will hit the reputation hard, so the developers will use all resources just to meet the deadline. I wonder what gamers would prefer in this scenario: wait until 2026 and get the “candy” or get something in 2025 that is impossible to play? The question is rhetorical.