Will GTA 6 keep its 2025 release date? 20 years of Rockstar delays say probably not

GamesActionGrand Theft AutoGrand Theft Auto 6Will GTA 6 keep its 2025 release date? 20 years of Rockstar delays say probably notWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Rockstar)

The two GTA 6 protagonists walk into a convenience store, guns pointed.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but people are pretty excited for Grand Theft Auto 6. At time of writing, Rockstar’s loneGTA 6 traileris sitting at a pretty 213 million views on YouTube, and all those millions of viewers are eagerly awaiting that unspecified day in fall 2025 when they’ll be loosed on an unsuspecting Vice City—except for those of us on PC, who are still waiting on an official word from Rockstar for when we might expect our own release.

Of course, that fall 2025 release window is far from guaranteed. We’re firmly in the age of the triple-A release delay, where it’s safe to assume that a game’s launch date is tentative right up to the hour it’s due to unlock on Steam. Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two, might be “highly confident” in GTA 6’s launch timeline, but after looking at the last 20 years of Rockstar’s release history, I can’t say that’s a confidence I share.

Reconstructing the exact timelines of Rockstar’s game announcements and eventual releases isn’t the easiest task, even during times when the Internet Archive isn’t activelyundergoing a DDOS attack. Final release dates are easy enough to confirm; original release dates and delay announcements, however, aren’t as simple. According to aPew Research studypublished earlier this year, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are inaccessible today. Almost every gaming news outlet that might’ve reported on Rockstar’s release timelines since the early 2000s has been sold, redesigned, or outright shuttered at least once over the ensuing years, and any one of those scenarios can mean the loss of an entire news archive.

Still, after enough amateur digital archeology and frantic Googling, the history is pretty clear: Every one of Rockstar’s major open world games from the last 20 years was delayed at least once before release. Often, those delays were announced shortly before the game’s original launch window.

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“The title’s launch date was moved to allow additional time for final testing of the game,” Take-Two said in the San Andreas delay announcement, before confirming an eventual PC release for San Andreas that would follow in June 2005. History only ever repeats itself; 20 years later, we’re still waiting on GTA PC port announcements. The delay also came with a confirmation that Grand Theft Auto was coming to Game Boy Advance. It was a simpler time.

(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

A gunman points a revolver at John Marston’s back in Red Dead Redemption.

From there, Rockstar’s delays started to lengthen. Theearliest reporting about Bullysaid Rockstar originally planned an October 2005 release, but it wouldn’t hit retail until a year later. In the meantime, as IGN reported,Rockstar revealed GTA 4during an E3 2006 press conference, during which they announced an intended release date of October 16, 2007. According to anarchived Kotaku Australia storyfrom August 2007, Take-Two announced two months before its original release date that Niko Bellic’s landing in Liberty City would be delayed until Q2 2008. GTA 4’s final April 29, 2008 release date, just over a half a year later than originally planned, wasconfirmed a few months later.

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GTA 4 was the last time Rockstar’s game announcements included specific release dates.

Next up, Rockstar went all in on cowboys with Red Dead Redemption, announced in February 2009 with an initial release window of “autumn this year,” according toIGN’s coverage. It wasn’t until autumn had mostly passed thatRockstar announcedthe first of Red Dead Redemption’s two delays, shifting its release date to April 27, 2010.

A month before Red Dead Redemption was due to mosey into town, Rockstar announcedanother delay, placing its final release date in May 2010. “We think it’s a better release window and it gives us a few more weeks to market,” Zelnick said while announcing the delay in a quarterly financial report. Like GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption’s delays put its release roughly half a year past its original launch window.

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GTA 5’s original console releases were only delayed once: After setting an initialSpring 2013launch window,Rockstar announcedin January 2013 that GTA 5 would instead arrive on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on September 17, 2013—once again, around a half-year delay.

GTA 5’s PC release, however, was a prolonged Sisyphean torment.Originally plannedto launch alongside the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions in Fall 2014, the PC port suffered three delays before its eventual April 2015 release: first inSeptember 2014, thenJanuary 2015, and finally inFebruary 2015. In each case, the delay announcement arrived shortly before the expected launch, with the second delay hitting just two weeks before the PC port’s planned January release.

(Image credit: Rockstar)

Trevor walks away from a burning van in Grand Theft Auto 5.

“Moving a release date is never a decision we take lightly and is a choice we make only when we know it is in the best interests of the game and our fans,” Rockstar said in its January 2015 delay announcement.

Most recently, Red Dead Redemption 2’s delays—first from Fall 2017 toSpring 2018, then toOctober 2018, with a PC release following in Fall 2019—give the impression that Rockstar has settled into a predictable rhythm of delays. Two delays, give or take, seems par for the course, leaving an eventual release that’s somewhere between a six months to a year after it was originally expected.

Am I expecting GTA 6 in 2025? Looking at 20 years of Rockstar delays, I’d be surprised to see it—and I’d be doubly surprised to see a PC release before another year’s past. I’d be thrilled to be wrong, of course, and not just because it’d mean a shorter wait. While you might expect that a delay would provide developers with more breathing room, it often does the opposite.

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