Rockstar delays Grand Theft Auto VI to November 2026 release

Rockstar Games pushed Grand Theft Auto VI to Thursday, November 19, 2026, extending a launch that had already slipped once from its original 2025 window to May 26, 2026. The new date keeps the industry on notice for what Rockstar has described as one of the biggest game launches in history.

The game is set in the state of Leonida, including Vice City, USA, with protagonists Jason and Lucia at the center of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state. Rockstar first announced the title on December 4, 2023, saying it would come to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the long wait has only sharpened attention around a franchise that last delivered a mainline entry with Grand Theft Auto V in 2013.

That anticipation was visible immediately. The first trailer, released on December 4, 2023, drew 90,421,491 views in 24 hours on YouTube, a performance Guinness World Records recognized as the most viewed videogame reveal trailer in that span. For Rockstar, the trailer did more than set a record: it turned a release date into a global event and put the game at the center of entertainment’s calendar long before launch.

The delay also arrives with a shadow from 2022, when leaked development footage circulated online and later led to the sentencing of Arion Kurtaj in the United Kingdom to an indefinite hospital order. That breach intensified scrutiny around the secrecy that has surrounded the project ever since, and the new release date pushes the payoff further into the future.

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., Rockstar’s parent company, has said the game will drive fiscal 2027 performance and reiterated in May 2025 that it expects record net bookings in fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027. The shift has also rippled beyond Rockstar’s own pipeline, with publishers reassessing release schedules around the game’s launch window as they try to avoid being swallowed by a title that could dominate both sales and attention on day one.