GTA 6 delay was reportedly inevitable: "Nobody I've talked to at Rockstar has believed fall 2025 was a real window for a very long time now"

GTA 6 has been delayed from its previous fall 2025 release date to May 26, 2026. But while the GTA 6 2026 release delay might come as a surprise to many, the people actually making the game at Rockstar have reportedly been seeing the writing on the wall for quite some time.

"Nobody I've talked to at Rockstar has believed Fall 2025 was a real window for a very long time now," according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, posting on Bluesky. "Too much work, not enough time, and what appears to be a real desire from management to avoid brutal crunch. GTA VI slipping to 2026 has seemed inevitable for months, if not longer."

Rockstar parent company Take-Two has repeatedly reasserted that GTA 6 would launch in 2025, though CEO Strauss Zelnick has acknowledged that "there's always a risk of slippage." Today, Zelnick wrote that the company will "support fully Rockstar Games taking additional time to realize their creative vision."

Assuming that the delay is, indeed, partly down to a "real desire" to avoid crunch, it's a remarkable turnaround for Rockstar's work culture. Widespread reports of brutal crunch hung over the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 back in 2018, so hopefully things have genuinely improved at the studio in the years since.

As players, though... well, we've already waited 12 years for GTA 6. We can handle one more – assuming you're not holding out for the eventual PC version, that is.

Dig into our ranking of the best Rockstar games of all time.