We're still waiting
Grand Theft Auto VI gets pushed back to May 26, 2026
Rockstar: Extra time will let us "deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve."
Kyle Orland
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May 2, 2025 9:35 am
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Sorry babe, our trip back to Vice City is going to have to wait a little while longer.
Credit:
Rockstar Games
Sorry babe, our trip back to Vice City is going to have to wait a little while longer.
Credit:
Rockstar Games
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Rockstar's highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI will finally launch on May 26, 2026, Rockstar Games said in a Friday morning announcement.
That means the game will miss the "2025" release window that the developer announced alongside the game's first trailer in late 2023. That delay is needed, Rockstar said, so the company can use "this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve."
"We are very sorry that this is later than you expected," Rockstar wrote in its announcement. "The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game."
A long wait gets longer
While disappointing for franchise fans, today's official announcement of a delay hasn't exactly been unexpected. Insider sources have been reporting that the 2025 release target looked unlikely for well over a year now.
"Nobody I’ve talked to at Rockstar has believed Fall 2025 was a real window for a very long time now," Bloomberg's Jason Schreier wrote on Bluesky this morning. "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."
The new planned launch date of Grand Theft Auto VI now falls a full 4,634 days after the Sept. 17, 2013 launch of Grand Theft Auto V on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. By contrast, there was just a 1,967-day gap between the release of Grand Theft Auto V and the prior release Grand Theft Auto IV, which also launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360 on April 29, 2008.
Rockstar announces a planned 2025 release date for Grand Theft Auto VI in a late 2023 trailer.
In the thousands of days since Grand Theft Auto V launched, the game has sold a staggering 210 million copies, according to publisher Take Two (including sales for subsequent ports and remasters on the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC). Much of that success has been driven by the enduring popularity of Grand Theft Auto Online, a mode that has been a consistent cash cow for Take Two for well over a decade now, despite dated online code that has led to persistent issues surrounding cheaters and hackers.
Rockstar's initial 2023 announcement of GTA VI pointedly left out any mention of a PC version alongside the planned PS5 and Xbox Series X/S releases (though Rockstar later confirmed that port will be coming at some point). Rockstar's history of delayed PC ports, including a long wait for a heavily delayed PC version of Grand Theft Auto V, suggests that PC players may have to wait significantly longer than their console-playing brethren to play GTA VI, though.
“We don't always go across all platforms simultaneously," Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN earlier this year when asked about PC release plans. "Historically, Rockstar has started with some platforms and then historically moved to other platforms.”
There's also no word if Rockstar has any plans to bring some version of Grand Theft Auto VI to the Switch 2, a console that was still the whisper of a rumor when the game was officially announced in 2023.
Back in 2022, Rockstar suffered what it called a "network intrusion" that led to the leak of some extremely early Grand Theft Auto VI footage onto the wider Internet. "We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way," Rockstar wrote at the time. "Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned and we remain as committed as ever to delivering an experience to you, our players, that truly exceeds your expectations."
Kyle Orland
Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland
Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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