Industry experts warn that GTA 6's still-unannounced release date could harm the gaming industry as a whole, as many big publishers are holding off or could end up delaying their upcoming games as to avoid Rockstar's release.
The release of a new Grand Theft Auto title would be highly anticipated regardless, but the 12 years since the last entry have made an already enormous fanbase absolutely desperate to get their hands on it's latest game.
GTA 6 is not only the most anticipated game of the year but probably the last decade too, and some insiders are even speculating that the excitement could be enough to justify pushing a substantial price increase.
All eyes and wallets will be fixated on storefronts once it finally drops sometime this fall, so it's understandable why some other publishers might be cautiously avoiding a fight for consumers' attention.
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It's become such a worrying topic that Ben Porter, director of consulting at industry intelligence firm Newzoo, has warned that anticipation surrounding GTA 6's release could 'tank' some companies if they guess wrong, as reported by PC Gamer.
"If you're a game company who's holding its breath waiting for GTA 6 to get out, and then it gets delayed by three, four, five, six months, what do you do?" Hypothesized Porter in conversation with PC Gamer at GDC 2025.
"You either have to be able to launch into that big black hole that's been left open now, or you have to extend your run rate by an additional six months - I'm certain some companies are going to tank as a result of that, right?"
Delays have become extremely commonplace in the games industry, as development teams often need a little bit more time to polish things and squash bugs that would otherwise ruin the players' experience - a consequence of increased scale too.
However, with the threat of GTA 6 in the fall publishers have one of two choices really. Either release your game earlier on in the year, which can prove troublesome if it's not entirely ready, or wait until the winter months or even 2026.
Aforementioned rumors surrounding a price increase could also create additional issues, as that only increases the likelihood that gamers would only buy GTA 6 within that window, meaning that any competing release stands virtually no chance.
As Porter alludes to, if you bet wrong and opt to release after GTA 6's currently planned window and then it gets delayed, then you're stuck in no mans land of either continuing to wait or fighting an unwinnable battle against an industry behemoth that you'd already pushed back to avoid.
When weighing up the positive impact that GTA 6's release will have on the gaming industry as a whole, Porter outlines: "It will certainly have an effect. It will put eyes back on the games market from investors and things like that.
"But everybody that we're talking to, they're ships trying to move out of the way of this big iceberg that is GTA 6. Everybody's trying to pull their game forward, push their game back - their strategy is to get out of the way. So if that's what everybody's behavior is, then how to do you believe that this is going to rejuvenate the games industry?"
A lot is weighing on the shoulders of GTA's release and it seems like there's no real best case scenario when it comes for developers not named Rockstar, but seemingly things could get a lot worse if things don't fall in line with currently predicted plans.