GTA 6 might have been delayed once already, but now that it has a concrete, actual release date rather than a vague release window, Take-Two’s CEO is confident it won’t slip again.
When GTA 6 was properly unveiled last year, Rockstar Games had only said it would come out sometime in the latter half of 2025 – a time frame Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick held onto firmly in the months since. But the developer recently pushed its highly-anticipated blockbuster out of this year, to May 26, 2026.
Speaking to IGN, Zelnick said the “most important thing to do is to support your teams in their search for perfection,” even though the “delays pain me – how could they not?”
Even more notably, though, when asked about how confident he is in GTA 6’s new launch, Zelnick simply pointed to the fact that Rockstar Games rarely delays something after they attach a solid date to it. “I think historically when we set a specific date, generally speaking, we’ve been very good about reaching it,” he said.
Looking back, he’s not wrong either. Red Dead Redemption 2 was delayed from fall 2017 to spring 2018 to, finally, October 2018 where it actually strolled into release. The same thing happened with GTA 5, too. After missing its original launch window of early 2013, the evergreen open world was pushed to that same September and made it onto store shelves as planned.
So, yeah, historical precedent is on the studio’s side. The first delay is almost a formality at this point. Plus, there’s no reason to think Rockstar Games would announce a date it’s not confident it can meet – it would be like setting a doomsday countdown.
Take-Two’s CEO says GTA 5 is the “standard-bearer for our industry,” but even he found the GTA 6 hype “pretty astonishing”
