GTA 6 delay won’t be decided until next year warns ex-Rockstar dev

16 Sep

GTA 6 delay won’t be decided until next year warns ex-Rockstar dev

GTA 6 artwork featuring a female and male character leaning on the hood of a car, surrounded by pink skies and palm trees — Should we brace for delay? (Rockstar Games)

A former Rockstar employee has said there’s little chance we’ll hear about any delay to GTA 6 this year, as he explains the production of GTA 4.

GTA 6 is set to be the biggest game of the decade, perhaps of all time, with fans desperately scrambling for hints of a new trailer, while the industry itself prays it will lead to a boost in console sales.

The big question is when it will be released. Rockstar Games owner Take-Two recently confirmed the sequel is on track to launch in autumn 2025, but various sources since have claimed it has been pushed back to 2026 – causing conflict among insiders.

A former Rockstar North employee has now given some insight into when delays have occurred in the past at the studio, suggesting any potential delay isn’t decided until much closer to the original launch date.

Will GTA 6 be delayed?

In a post on Twitter, Obbe Vermeij, who worked at Rockstar North between 1995 and 2009 as a technical director across GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, and GTA 4,explained how the decision to delay GTA 4 happened four months before it was originally set to launch in October 2007 (it eventually came out in April 2008).

‘The decision to delay GTA 4 was made four months or so before the original release date,’ Vermeij wrote. ‘Any further and it’s hard to make the call. Rockstar is probably not in a position to determine whether they will hit 2025 until May-ish.’

While he states that he has ‘no inside info’ on GTA 6, Vermeij also claims Rockstar will not launch GTA 6 until the studio is ‘100% happy with it.’

https://twitter.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1835058223012893107

‘GTA 6 will sell for 10+ years and there is no competition to worry about,’ he added. ‘They are not going to release the game until they’re 100% happy with it. No matter what it said in the trailer.’

While Vermeij undoubtedly has some insight into Rockstar’s development culture, it’s worth noting that the studio, and game development at large, has changed significantly since he left the company back in 2009.

The longtime studio president of Rockstar North, Leslie Benzies, departed the studio in 2016 after 15 years, while Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who was a lead creative force behind GTA, left in 2020. His brother and co-founder, Sam Houser, is the current president of Rockstar Games.

Judging by Rockstar’s history though, a delay for GTA 6 certainly isn’t out of the question. Along with GTA 4, its sequel GTA 5 missed its initial Q2 2013 release date and was pushed back to September, while Red Dead Redemption 2 was delayed twice, from the second half of 2017 to October 2018.

If it’s hard to determine whether GTA 6 will actually come out in 2025, we might be better off speculating over when we’ll see the next trailer – with some fans believing we could see a fresh glimpse in October.