Publishers want to release their games as far away from Grand Theft Auto 6 as possible

Grand Theft Auto 6 is the most highly anticipated video game that’s currently in development, and its eventual release is likely going to change the industry forever. With Rockstar currently aiming for a 2025 release, this gaming juggernaut is understandably intimidating many other companies.

Anonymous sources from competing video game publishers talked to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and confirmed that these companies are waiting as long as possible to see when Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch before they announce a specific release date for their own products. They’re especially concerned because Rockstar still hasn’t announced an official date for the game, and nobody is really sure if it’s going to make its deadline or if the studio will delay it to 2026.

Image via Rockstar Games

The concerns of these competitors are 100% justified because Grand Theft Auto 6 will inevitably become the biggest game of whatever year it comes out in. Almost everyone will be playing it and talking about it on social media for at least a few weeks after its launch, so releasing another high-budget video game around the same time would be a death sentence, no matter what IP it belongs to.

You can expect multiple game delays the moment Rockstar announces its concrete release date. Nevertheless, the fact that GTA 6 is having this big of an effect on the entire industry is undeniable proof of how excited consumers are about it. After all, they have been waiting for this game for over 10 years, seeing as GTA 5 came out way back in 2013.

Is Grand Theft Auto 6 actually coming out in 2025?

Screenshot via Rockstar Games/YouTube

At the end of the day, that’s the real question. Rockstar released the first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer a little over a year ago (which quickly became one of the most watched game trailers in YouTube’s history) that confirmed that it’s going to come out sometime in 2025 but hasn’t revealed much more information about the game since.

In the span of a year, there have been multiple rumors about the potential release of a second trailer, but it hasn’t materialized yet. To make things even worse, Rockstar’s parent company and GTA 6‘s publisher, Take-Two, laid off 400 employees back in April, which many fans saw as a bad sign. On the bright side, the CEO of the company, Strauss Zelnick, said that Rockstar delayed the game internally because it “seeks perfection” and that, fortunately, Take-Two is confident that Grand Theft Auto 6 will come out in the Fall of 2025.

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