The pressure is on Grand Theft Auto 6 to deliver, but can it possibly meet such huge expectations?
2026 preview: Numerous delays have some wondering whether Rockstar will even hit its latest release date
In our 2025 previews last year, we made a prediction that looks naive in hindsight.
“There are very few certainties in life, but GTA 6 being the biggest media release of 2025 is about as close to a sure thing as you can ever get”, we wrote.
Little did we know that a full year down the line, we’d not only be here talking about Grand Theft Auto 6 once again, but doing so with the knowledge that it’s still at least another 11 months away.
Since that last preview, the game has suffered not one, but two major delays. Originally announced to release in fall 2025, earlier this year Rockstar posted a statement announcing that the game had been moved back to May 26th, 2026.
Then, last month, Rockstar stated that it had been delayed once again, this time to November 19th, 2026, thereby pushing it a full year past its initially proposed release window.
The longer it takes to release, the more pressure builds on Rockstar Games to deliver on what is far and away the most hyped video game in recent memory. People aren’t just expecting GTA 6 to be excellent – anything other than one of the best video games ever created will be considered a failure.
After all, there are very few media releases – we’re talking video games, movies, music, books, TV shows, anything – that have earned such a degree of mass anticipation, to the extent that there’s now a long-running “can’t believe we got X before GTA 6” joke online, treating its release as some sort of anno domini of popular culture.
By the time Grand Theft Auto 6 is released, it will have been a full 13 years since its predecessor. Players are anticipating not just your typical sequel, but a generational shift over what game before – quite literally, when you consider that some players who will legally be able to buy the game were only 5 years old when GTA 5 was released.
Internal pressure to deliver is one thing, but external pressure – from formerly internal sources, ironically – has made things even more complicated for Rockstar in recent weeks, following its decision to fire around 30 employees, in a case which has received enough attention to have been mentioned in Parliament.
“Players are anticipating not just your typical sequel, but a generational shift over what game before – quite literally, when you consider that some players who will legally be able to buy the game were only 5 years old when GTA 5 was released.”
Rockstar claims the employees were leaking confidential information, the employees claim Rockstar fired them for trying to start a union. Whatever the reason, it’s clearly an extra complication that the studio doesn’t need at a particularly crucial time in the development of such an important product, and a speedy resolution doesn’t appear to be on the cards.
Putting its potential employment troubles to the side for now, Rockstar still looks set to enjoy one one of the largest media launches in history, with the very real potential to break records, and the release of the second trailer earlier this year did nothing to dampen that hype.
Receiving nearly half a billion views on its first day alone, the latest trailer for GTA 6 gave players a much better look at protagonists Lucia and Jason, as well as the Florida-inspired state of Leonida where it will be set.
It’s clear from both trailers that GTA 6 will continue the series’ tradition of offering a satirical take on US culture, but given that we now live in an era where the minutiae of society is broken down on social media on a minute-by-minute basis and where reality – especially in the world of politics – is often more ridiculous than anything fictonal, it remains to be seen whether GTA 6’s commentary will make the same waves the series used to, or whether it will now be a mere drop in the ocean of opinion.
It will also be interesting to see what happens to GTA Online, the multiplayer component of GTA 5, which continues to turn an extremely healthy profit for Rockstar’s partner Take-Two more than a decade after its launch. Will the publisher push for a similar strategy with its NBA 2K and WWE 2K games and insist that support for the old GTA Online stop on the day its GTA 6 replacement arrives, or will it be wary of rocking the cash canoe it has just now and prefer a more gradual transition to the new GTA Online experience?
With its new release sat for November 19, it may still be a number of months until we get the answers to those questions, and the online meme will be able to cite plenty more major events – another FIFA World Cup, the Winter Olympics, the US Midterms, the second Super Mario Bros Movie – set to happen before we get GTA 6.
That is, of course, until Rockstar decides to delay it again, and we have to write about it again when we do our 2027 Previews next year.
