All eyes in the video game industry are watching to see when Grand Theft Auto 6 will release. The potential impact on the industry is expected to be very large, but several publishers planning to release games around the same time are ready to delay just to get out of its way.
“We Don’t Want to Be Anywhere Near That”
According to Christopher Dring of the recently launched outlet The Game Business, “three major video game publishers” are ready to delay their games to avoid GTA 6. Dring says that the boss “of one of the world’s biggest game publishers” told him: “Rockstar games always suck a lot of money and, more importantly, time out of the market. We don’t want to be anywhere near that. We are working up multiple different plans for our titles.”
This past weekend at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson was told by a few developers that they’re “waiting to see what GTA 6 does.” Back in December, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that competing publishers are “waiting as long as possible to commit to their release date.”
The launch of GTA 6, tentatively scheduled for October 2025, reportedly isn’t just scaring off major new releases. According to Dring, two developers of “top 10 live-service games” are not planning any significant updates during the GTA 6 launch window. One studio boss reportedly said that they would “nudge” their releases ahead or backwards three weeks just to avoid GTA 6. The studio heads that spoke to Dring spoke of other potential issues, like a crowded schedule of other games trying to avoid GTA 6, but those problems seem preferable than trying to compete with a potentially industry-altering release. However, as one industry consultant noted at GDC, waiting on GTA 6 only for it to delay could “tank” those developers.
Are game developers perhaps being too cautious of the GTA 6 release, or are they wise to get out of the way? Let us know down in the comments below! Let us know down below, and join more discussions in the official Insider Gaming Forums.
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