The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: 'Some companies are going to tank' if they guess wrong, says analyst

The near future plans of many game studios depend on whether or not Grand Theft Auto 6 actually releases this year, and making the wrong guess could be disastrous for some of them, says Ben Porter, director of consulting at games industry intelligence firm Newzoo.

"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?" said Porter in an interview with PC Gamer at GDC 2025 this week. "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?"

GTA 6 is currently scheduled to launch on consoles this fall (PC is still TBD, annoyingly), but it's so common for games to be delayed that it's easy to imagine it being pushed into 2026. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed, Starfield was delayed, Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed—big games get delayed, a lot.

It's also common for studios to time their releases to avoid big competitors that are likely to hog the limelight, and there isn't a bigger hog than a new GTA. Even very niche games might want to get out of the way, picking release dates in spring or summer 2026.

But if GTA 6 is itself delayed to spring or summer 2026, those developers could end up having to push their release dates even further out. A setback like that could be disastrous for a studio whose finances are already fragile, and given the number of closures we've seen in recent years, financial fragility doesn't seem rare.

On the other hand, a last-minute GTA 6 delay would be a big opportunity for anyone who can fill the space with a game that tides over disappointed GTA fans. There's a lot of money riding on what Rockstar decides to do before the year ends, and not just for Rockstar.

One possible clue about the likelihood of a GTA 6 delay is the Borderlands 4 release date: September 23, 2025. Why would Take-Two, which owns both Borderlands 4 and Grand Theft Auto 6, put them in competition with each other this fall? Does the Borderlands 4 release date mean that GTA 6 is likely to be delayed?

It's a sensible guess, but I wouldn't want money riding on it. Porter says there's hope that the games industry as a whole could get a boost from GTA 6's release—which if nothing else will probably get a lot of people to upgrade their consoles—but he doubts that industry execs are going to be all smiles this fall, whatever happens.

"You do hear a lot of people who are saying that GTA 6 is going to rejuvenate the market," said Porter. "And I think that there's an element of truth to that, but I don't know that it's necessarily going to be universally uplifting.

"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 do you believe that this is going to rejuvenate the games industry?"

Porter gave a talk at GDC about Newzoo's latest industry report, which among other things estimates that PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, and that there are 908 million of us.