Rockstar has allegedly mentioned that the reason behind the delay was to avoid the heavy overtime (or crunch, if you prefer) on the gaming industry’s most anticipated game…

Grand Theft Auto VI has officially received its release date (we reported about it earlier). It will be available for current-gen consoles not when we thought it would be, as Rockstar and Take-Two are not keeping the release date for fall 2025, but half a year later, which is a pretty serious delay.

Despite the fact that Rockstar has had its biggest games delayed at least once or twice in its history, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick previously insisted that Grand Theft Auto VI would be released in the fall of 2025. That didn’t work out (the publisher’s stock plummeted on the announcement…), though many fans believed there would be no delay this time around.

Bloomberg editor Jason Schreier suggests that Rockstar has known about this delay for some time. On Bluesky he wrote that, based on conversations with Rockstar employees, there hasn’t been a realistic chance of Grand Theft Auto VI coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series in the fall of 2025 for a very long time. However, the developers knew that the postponement was not only because it would have been too much work to be ready for the fall of 2025, but because Rockstar actually wanted the team to avoid having to resort to crunch.

“No one I’ve talked to at Rockstar has believed that fall 2025 was a real window for a very long time. Too much work, not enough time, and what appears to be a genuine desire on the part of management to avoid a brutal crunch. Grand Theft Auto VI slipping into 2026 has seemed inevitable for months, if not longer,” Schreier wrote.

So Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

Source: WCCFTech