Rockstar still have some "breathing room" before end of fiscal 2027, says reporter

Image credit: Rockstar Games

GTA 6 may not yet be “content complete”, according to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg’s scooper-dooper journoman Jason Schreier, and he would not be “super shocked” if the new Miami-set open world game were delayed again, though he thinks the current 19th November 2026 release date is relatively solid.

Before we Press X to Jason, it’s time for an exciting recap montage of Grand Theft Auto 6 release setbacks. Back in May 2024, Rockstar narrowed an initial GTA 6 2025 launch window to fall 2025, with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick commenting in November that “we are highly confident in that timing”, despite mounting rumours that the new GTA would slip back.

Zelnick reiterated that confidence in February 2025. Three months later, Take-Two and Rockstar delayed GTA 6 to May 26th 2026. Then in November 2025, the publishers shoved it back to November this year.

None of this is massively surprising – videogames are messy productions and GTA games are both vast in scope and burdened by radioactive levels of expectation. Still, pour one out for the other developers who’ve been dancing back and forth with their own release dates, in a bid to avoid getting sat on by Rockstar’s glossy crime bonanza.

Schreier thinks GTA 6 might run into another delay, based on his most recent conversations with sources (he didn’t give an exact timeframe). “I mean, this is how Rockstar works, or at least has worked in recent decades, I suppose in the last decade with Red Dead 2,” he observed in an interview with The Ringer-Verse Button Mash podcast. “If you look at the history there, they announced it for fall 2017, then it slipped the spring 2018 and then it slipped again to fall 2018 and there it landed October of that year.”

“So I wouldn’t be super shocked if that is what happens again this time around,” Schreier continued. “This is a big and complicated game and the last I heard it was still not content complete. That is to say that people were still finishing things up, still finalising levels and missions, and seeing what’s going to make it into the game. Typically the way that game development works, you have your feature complete, your content complete, your bug-testing phases.

“And there’s a lot of boundaries blurred along the way, in all of those different stages, but they are still still making stuff. And we’ll hopefully be done with that soon and just have a whole bunch of time for fixing bugs. But even during those phases, there’s always someone who wants to sneak in some last minute stuff. So it’s really hard to say.”

Schreier added that “I don’t think anyone in Rockstar could tell you with 100% certainty that they will make it out in November, but I think this feels a little bit more real than fall 2025 did. That was never real and even more real than May [2026] did.”

In discussion of GTA 6’s release delays, Zelnick has repeatedly lauded Rockstar for chasing “perfection”. It’s a bit of a double-edged compliment, needless to say. Perfection may be undefinable, but any perceptible imperfections here are going to have steep financial consequences.

“With a game like this, the stakes are so high, they really can’t settle for anything less than perfection with this release, because there’s so much riding on it,” Schreier continued on the podcast. “The stock of Take Two lives or dies on this game - every time this game slips, their shares drop 10%, I should say. So yeah, it’s not something that they will release in any sort of compromised state. So even if it comes to like October and they’re like, you know, the game is not 100% ready, I suspect they would rather slip than release it.”

Schreier added that by picking a November date, Rockstar and Take Two have given themselves a little breathing room to get the game out before Take-Two’s fiscal 2027 earnings report in March 2027. “Obviously they would want to be out for the holiday season and Black Friday and all the beautiful Christmas sales that they always do. But I think they have a little bit of buffer to next March if they still want to release the game within the fiscal year.”

All of this risks being academic to us Rock Paper Shotgunners, because GTA 6 has still yet to be formally confirmed for PC. Schreier had little to say about possible PC dates, but did observe that GTA 6 is a particularly big game for PlayStation, with sales on Xbox “almost a non-factor” by comparison. “In some ways it’s kind of like a PlayStation exclusive, in that most of the sales will be on PlayStation and it will sell a lot of PlayStation 5s alongside it. So I suspect that Sony is planning its entire calendar around GTA and will not release anything within the blast zone.” This is useful intel, inasmuch as we can deduce Rockstar’s thinking from Sony’s movements.

Even as other developers, publishers and players gear up for this November’s GTAppening, Rockstar North face a legal challenge in the UK from former GTA 6 developers, who say they were ousted for forming a union. Rockstar contend that the fired developers were leaking confidential information on a Discord forum. In a rare display of having an opinion publicly, UK prime minister Keir Starmer has called it "a deeply concerning case" that deserves further government investigation.