GTA 6 release date won’t slip to 2026, Take Two assure – they’re “highly confident” about fall 2025
A few months ago, the rumour took root that GTA 6’s release date would slip back from 2025 to 2026. An anonymous insider averred that studio heads were “worried” about the new open world game’s progress – hence, perhaps, Rockstar’s decision to mandate a full return to in-office work. Pshaw, say publishers Take-Two CEO. They announced a fall 2025 launch in March and have just doubled down on it in their latest financial briefing, with CEO Strauss Zelnick subsequently going on the tellybox to say that Take-Two are “highly confident in the timing”, though he still has nothing to share about GTA 6 on PC.
Asked how Take-Two work out a game’s release timing by CNBC, Zelnick commented that “there are elements that you can actually measure, for example the number of bugs in a title, and every one of us will make sure we have as few bugs as possible before we launch.
“However, in the case of an extraordinary title, for which there are extraordinary expectations, it’s not really about bugs,” he went on. “It’s about creating an experience that no one’s seen before, and Rockstar Games seeks perfection in what they do. And perfection is indeed hard to measure, it really is more subjective than objective.”
CNBC were not appeased by these scintillating philosophical bon mots. They pressed ahead, asking Zelnick how confident he was in the fall 2025 timing, given that it wasn’t so long ago that Take-Two had GTA 6 pinned for 2025 at large.
“Well, there is slippage in the industry and we’re not immune from that,” Zelnick replied. “However, we narrowed the timing because we are highly confident in that timing.”
Here’s another GTA 6 release snippet by way of Variety, who had their own interview with Zelnick. In this latter chinwag, Zelnick commented that the game won’t release at the same time as Borderlands 4, due between 1st April 2025 and 31st March 2026, because “it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t, and no one would, stack up huge releases unnecessarily.” I think it’s also safe to say that if it came to a conflict over launch windows, Borderlands 4 would be the one to make room.
The fall 2025 release only covers the game’s console showing, of course. Take-Two have yet to spill the beans about the GTA 6 PC release date, but Zelnick did say in an earnings call last night that they’re feeling pretty good about PC support in general.
“The audience is going to show up if you have great properties, so we just have to make sure to be on an array of platforms,” he said, via Gamesradar. “If one platform diminishes in value, there’s always another one.
“We’re seeing great growth in PC right now, for example. I have been of the view that open formats would continue to grow and PC is an open format. I do think PC will continue to be a more and more important part of the console business going forward, and that isn’t complicated for us to support at all. So the bottom line is, we are selective about which platforms we support. We make the tech work when we can make it work, as long as the audience is big enough to make that worthwhile.”
If I had been present during that CNBC interview, I would have asked Zelnick what he thinks of the fact that GTA 5 players are obsessively trying to predict the next GTA 6 marketing beat based on the phases of the moon. This has blown up again on reddit lately because somebody’s realised that the Tom Petty song from the GTA 6 trailer, above, has the words “wait for the moon” in it.
I would have asked about this in the few seconds before somebody spotted the rando Britisher lurking behind the green screen and phoned security. “TELL ME ABOUT THE MOON, STRAUSS,” I would have bellowed, as huge men in tuxedos dragged me away into an unmarked van.