‘That was a great day’: Ghost of Yotei studio Sucker Punch celebrated GTA 6’s delay
Creative director Nate Fox says the team had a “multi-month hangover”
The creative director of Ghost of Yotei says the team celebrated when Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay was announced.
Rockstar Games had previously said the highly anticipated GTA 6 would be released in 2025, with publisher Take-Two still saying as recently as February that it was “launching Fall of Calendar 2025”.
However, in early May the studio announced that the game had been delayed “to deliver at the level of quality [players] expect and deserve”, and would now release on May 26, 2026.
The news likely came as a relief to developers and publishers planning on releasing games in the second half of 2025, as releasing around the same time as GTA 6 would likely have been a financial kiss of death.
This was confirmed by Ghost of Yotei creative director Nate Fox, who said the team at developer Sucker Punch was delighted to hear it wouldn’t have to compete with Rockstar’s game at release.
Fox was asked during a rapid-fire interview at MinnMax: “When GTA 6 was delayed did the entire studio pop some champagne?”
Fox replied: “We’re all still hungover. Multi-month hangover. That was a great day.”
Earlier this year a Bloomberg report claimed that rival game publishers were waiting as long as possible to commit to their release dates for Fall 2025, because of GTA 6’s planned release.
The report claimed that publishers wanted to see whether GTA 6 would make its Fall 2025 deadline or be delayed until 2026, with the goal being to put significant distance between the release of their own games and Rockstar’s.
Ghost of Yotei will be released on October 2, exclusively for PS5. In July, Sucker Punch sat down with VGC to discuss the upcoming game.
“Our game is very inspired by history, but we are not making a stone-for-stone recreation,” Fox told us. “Our game is a work of fiction.
“However, we do want to make the world feel authentic and be very respectful to the cultures that existed there. Thankfully, we are a part of Sony. So we have a lot of colleagues in Tokyo who really help us out, who give us a lot of guidance.”
