It’s quite a measure of the incredible status of the Grand Theft Auto franchise – as if anyone needed further convincing – that the announcement of the next instalment being delayed into 2026 quickly turned into a massive wave of hype for the upcoming game.
Take Two shares dropped when the delay was announced, understandably enough, but only by enough to shave a fraction off the massive gains they’ve made as anticipation has built for GTA 6 over the past couple of years. Then, the company released a new extended trailer for the game and shares promptly rebounded. The new trailer clocked up almost half a billion views in 24 hours – supposedly the biggest video launch in history, and honestly a pretty convincing mic drop for Rockstar.
What better way to point out that the anticipation for this game is so high that no amount of delay is going to take the edge off?
It’s very clear that GTA 6 is going to be an absolute monster of a game in commercial terms, quite probably racking up the biggest launch of all time in any entertainment medium, so the waves stirred up by its move from late 2025 to May 2026 will rock plenty of boats around the industry. Unless you’re extremely confident that your game targets an audience that’s substantially different from the broad swathe of the population that are interested in GTA 6, you probably don’t want to launch within the same release window.
It wouldn’t be surprising if even publishers in other mediums – movie companies or streaming platform operators, for example – were treating the GTA 6 launch window as pre-emptively scorched earth, knowing that so many millions of consumers will have both their leisure time and their discretionary spending well and truly accounted for during that period.
The extent to which it will actually change other publishers’ plans is very strictly limited
Hideo Kojima discussed the subject of release windows briefly on his KOJI 10 podcast (a Japanese language radio show he does for broadcaster TBS) this week, answering a listener’s question about how the June launch date for the upcoming Death Stranding 2 was chosen.
Most people in the industry would be very familiar with a lot of what he said. He talked about the perception that certain months or seasons are preferable for major releases, and explained how negotiations with retail buyers to secure physical shelf space used to be an incredibly important aspect of launch planning, for example.
As we consider the potential impact of such a giant title vacating its slot in late 2025 and moving instead into next Spring, though, the key aspect of Kojima’s discussion that stood out to me was his emphasis on how inflexible modern development schedules generally are, and how early in the process launch windows are actually decided.
On the one hand, Kojima confirmed what we all assume: that wherever possible, publishers will try to move their games away from other massive releases to avoid forcing consumers to make a choice with their wallets.
From that point of view, GTA 6 being scheduled for 2025 probably did push the release schedule around somewhat, and in theory its move to 2026 may leave a bit of a gap in this year’s line-up as a consequence (while elevating the hernia risk of anyone with a game currently targeting mid 2026).
Kojima didn’t say that GTA’s planned launch window changed the release planning for Death Stranding 2 (and I don’t think he intended to imply that either), but he did note that his own preference had been a September launch window, with the choice of June presumably being driven by strategic considerations about the launch line-up.
In terms of the ability to avoid a major game like GTA 6 landing in your launch window, though, Kojima noted that bringing the release of a game forward to avoid unwanted competition at launch is usually not an option. Launch windows are decided well in advance – Kojima was clear that DS2 has been in the June launch slot for a long time, probably predating the original GTA 6 announcement, so at a guess, the consideration here was probably nothing to do with GTA and instead reflected Sony’s internal discussions on where to schedule DS2 relative to other big first-party launches like Ghost of Yotei.
It’s absurdly unlikely that you could slim your 12 months of remaining work down to meet a late 2025 launch
Pulling a game forward three months on short notice because a rival announces a heavy hitter in your launch window just isn’t feasible for most development schedules. Instead, the only option available to most publishers if scheduling becomes unfavourable is to pump the brakes and delay their own game – not the worst option in the world if you have the financial flexibility to afford it and it lets you polish some things up before launch, but potentially a serious stretch for smaller companies who are counting on seeing a timely return on their multiple years of development investment.
That lack of flexibility in development timelines, combined with the knowledge that those timelines are now multiple years long, suggests that although GTA 6 hopping into the next financial year does change the competitive landscape, the extent to which it will actually change other publishers’ plans is very strictly limited.
You can already see evidence of that in the existing 2025 release calendar, which is stacked with major titles despite the industry’s expectation that GTA 6 would land this year. While the likelihood of a delay has been an open secret within the industry for a while now, the massive titles on this year’s line-up were scheduled long before scuttlebutt about GTA needing more time in the oven started to circulate.
Those games were planned with 2025 launch targets three or four years ago. GTA 6 being announced in that window caused some panicked meetings at the time, no doubt, but the actual logistics and costs involved in shifting the launch target for a project of that scale would arguably far outweigh the risk of getting your toes run over by the GTA juggernaut.
The same calculations will apply to 2026. If you have a project in the works right now that’s 12 months out from a mid 2026 launch, you’re probably sighing deeply about having GTA 6 in your launch window – but you’re also probably not looking at a lot of especially good options to deal with that, at least in terms of release scheduling.
You could push back to late 2026, but then you hit the most crowded time of year for big launches. Pushing back further to the early months of 2027 leaves you almost a year late and facing a launch in what’s traditionally considered the toughest time for a major release.
On the flip side, it’s absurdly unlikely that you could slim your 12 months of remaining work down to meet a late 2025 (or even early 2026) launch without massively compromising the quality of your game at launch.
The movement of GTA 6 into 2026 is certainly a seismic event big enough to rattle all the cups on the industry’s shelves, but probably not big enough to throw things around the room for real.
Titles launching at the end of this year will get a bit more commercial room to breathe, but it would be very surprising if any publisher is in a position to actually shuffle its launches to take advantage of the GTA 6-sized hole in the schedule. For those launching next spring, the calculus of the cost of moving out of the new launch window is likely to be unappetising.
The landscape may have shifted, but the players’ positions remain much the same – and everyone remains braced for the commercial impact of what’s likely to be the biggest launch in industry history.
