The Weekly Round-Up: GTA 6 delayed, Nintendo’s movie plans and Obsidian’s class structure
Our light-hearted recap of the week’s more interesting news
Chris Scullion
This is a blog post, where VGC writers post irreverent and (occasionally) entertaining coverage of video game culture.
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another of our weekly news round-ups.
For those new to our round-ups, we’ve been doing these recaps of the weekly news on Patreon for more than a year, and have decided to bring them to the main site. These are our way of winding up the past week by recapping its more interesting stories, often signed off with a bad punchline.
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That said, let’s crack on with this week’s round-up.
“Hi everyone,” Rockstar said in a statement on X. “Grand Theft Auto VI will now release on Thursday, November 19, 2026.
“We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.”
“We want to thank you again for your patience and support. While the wait is a little longer, we are incredibly excited for players to experience the sprawling state of Leonida and a return to modern day Vice City.”
In an interview with The Game Business, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said: “We feel really good about this release date. It’s in the same fiscal year, it happens to be a great release window, and naturally we’re really supportive of Rockstar’s approach.”
Other things Zelnick has “felt really good about” in the past included a lack of a global pandemic in the 21st century, Game of Thrones having a strong ending and critical praise for Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’ tour.
A brand new island based on Springfield is available for the next month, offering what Epic Games calls a “fast-paced, back to basics Battle Royale experience” for up to 80 players.
The new map is accompanied by a Springfield Battle Pass, which includes numerous rewards including premium skins such as Homer, Marge, Flanders, Blinky Fishstick and Springfielder Peely.
According to Epic Games, new content will be added each week, offering “new Simpsons-themed gameplay, shop offerings and more”.
Fans have been praising Epic Games for the sheer level of attention to detail that’s in there for Simpsons fans, though one way in which it does differ from its source material is that it does actually have an end date.
“It had about five different iterations,” he told Lex Fridman. “I don’t think it works, I concluded – and I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it – and I’ve concluded that what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games. We need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game”.
“[Spy] films are very, very frenetic, and they’re beat-to-beat,” he explained. “You’ve got to go here and save the world. You’ve got to go there and stop that person being killed, and then save the world.
“An open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it’s a lot looser, and you’re just hanging out and doing what you want. I want freedom, I want to go over here and do what I want, and I want to go over and do what you want, and that’s why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do.”
While Houser’s argument makes sense to an extent, he clearly forgot that one 007 movie where James Bond postpones his trip to Blofeld’s secret lair after he gets a call from his cousin asking him to go and play darts for half an hour.
Houser replied that while numerous global cities provide the sort of cultural melting pot which makes for a strong open-world game, the Grand Theft Auto series has American culture at its core, meaning there were never really any plans to set an instalment in London.
We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top-down game for the PS1,” Houser said. “That was pretty cute and fun, as the first mission pack ever for PlayStation.
“I think for a full GTA game, we always decided there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters.”
To be fair, Houser’s correct that British gangsters never have guns at all, as demonstrated in the much-loved British gangster film Lock, Stock and Two Big Sticks With Jaggy Nails In Them.
The Outer Worlds, Avowed and Grounded studio has a system whereby new employees pick one of three classes, and then continue to receive gifts for staying at the company, up to a total of 20 years.
“When you join the studio, you pick a class,” Obsidian‘s VP of operations Marcus Morgan explained. “It’s a warrior, a rogue or a wizard class. And then you go on that journey of collecting every item. So you start with some dice here,” he said, showing a set of D&D-style dice in a box with ‘Path of the Warrior’ written on it.
“And then you get the various aspects of those things. So you get, like, a shield, then an axe, and then a helm. The wizards get a cloak.”
The wizards also reportedly get a book of spells which they can use to charm HR representatives each time Microsoft plans a round of layoffs.
According to research, video game remakes and remasters released across 2024 and 2025 attracted 72.4 million players across Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam, with these consumers spending some $1.4bn on premium full games and microtransactions.
Notably, Ampere found that across 42 titles examined (15 remakes and 27 remasters released between January 2024 and September 2025), global spending on an average remake was more than twice that of the average remaster at 2.2x.
However, Ampere acknowledges that while the data suggests remakes can rejuvenate classic IP and attract new audiences, “they require substantially higher investment in development, marketing, and time.”
Ampere’s report also advises readers to return in 15 years’ time, where it will provide the same report with fancier graphs.
Chris Stockman – who was design director on the first Saints Row before leaving Volition, and now works for VR studio Bit Planet Games – posted on the Saints Row Reddit page that he was planning to propose a prequel to the original game.
“Guys and gals, I have hopeful news,” Stockman wrote. “I’ve been asked to create a pitch for a Saints Row reboot. I can’t say anything more than that but my dreams for this game just became a little more than just dreams.”
When numerous commenters shared concerns that Stockman may want to make a VR Saints Row game given the studio he runs, he added: “It won’t be a VR game. I’m really going back to my roots.”
Fans of the series who welcomed the news may have forgotten that the extremely silly gameplay the Saints Row series became known for didn’t actually start until later on, and the first game was a relatively serious GTA rival. This could be the video game equivalent, then, of the next Fast & Furious film being a low-scale, explosion-free story about underground street racing.
In a presentation following the release of its second quarter financial results, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa explained the company’s current approach and structure for movies and videos based on its IP.
Furukawa noted that rather than simply handing over the IP to a film studio and letting them figure it out, Nintendo is “deeply involved” in the production of its movies, “from planning and development through to production”.
Furukawa then showed a slide titled Building a Framework for a Consistent Release Cadence, which showed Nintendo’s three confirmed movies – The Super Mario Bros Movie in 2023, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in 2026 and The Legend of Zelda in 2027 – along with two question marks and an ellipsis, suggesting there are more films to come.
One of the ways Nintendo is ensuring a consistent release schedule is by re-releasing The Super Mario Bros Movie again in 2028, but this time with Pikmin added to make it look like they were doing everything.
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