So, another day, another GTA 6 delay, with the highly anticipated game now set to release on November 19, 2026, though many of us expect that date to slip again. After all, it’s best to prepare for disappointment and not get your hopes up. At this rate, I won’t believe GTA 6 is being released until I have the game installed on my hard drive.
Still, despite my already gloomy outlook, this new delay was a blow. I’m getting on in years, and in my more morbid moments (I’m not that old), I worry I’ll die before playing the next GTA. At this rate, I’m getting concerned that our sun will expand and consume the Earth, followed by the eventual heat-death of the universe, which will cause Take-Two to further delay the game.
I’m old enough to remember the heady days when we got three GTA games, GTA III, GTA Vice City, and GTA San Andreas in just under four years. These days, it feels like entire civilisations rise and fall between instalments.
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(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
If I sound a bit gloomy, maybe even a little dramatic, then please indulge me. As you might have guessed with my reference to hard drives, I am primarily a PC gamer these days, so even if GTA 6 launches on consoles next November, people waiting for the PC version (which, let’s admit it, will be the best) will have to wait even longer.
I could be waiting until 2027 for this game, making it 30 years since I first played the GTA series, which originally launched on PC before consoles.
Can’t see the forest for the trees
Joking aside, I do see the reasoning behind delaying the game. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke to IGN to say that “when our competitors go to market before something was ready, bad things happen.”
It’s clear that people at Take-Two, which publishes the GTA series, had seen the extremely rocky launches of games like No Man’s Sky, Mindseye, and Fallout 76, which were panned at the time of their releases for seemingly launching before they were finished.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
The most famous example of this, and one that almost certainly didn’t go unnoticed by anyone at Take-Two or Rockstar, was the notorious launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
A graphically ambitious open-world RPG, and coming after the universally acclaimed Witcher 3, the hype before its launch was huge. Then, after a few delays, Cyberpunk 2077 was seemingly forced to launch in a very messy, unfinished state. The backlash was huge and almost single-handedly killed the developer CD Projekt Red’s reputation.
It makes perfect sense that the team behind GTA 6 doesn’t want something similar to happen, and delaying the game again to avoid that would certainly be sensible. However, by further delaying GTA 6 (it’s now been 12 years since GTA 5 launched), I worry that the game could end up not becoming the next Cyberpunk 2077… but the next Duke Nukem Forever.
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Current record for the longest development period for a videogame? 14 years and 43 days. Officially announced on 28 April 1997 by developer 3D Realms, the FPS ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ was finally released on 10 June 2011. https://t.co/8XBZGM3i98November 6, 2025
Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, following on from the commercial and critical success of Duke Nukem 3D. Following years of delays, the game finally launched in 2011, 14 years after first being announced. Was it worth the wait? Sadly, no, it just wasn’t a very good game.
Now, I don’t think in any way that GTA 6 will be a bad game, but as the delays pile up, I worry it could resemble Duke Nukem Forever in other ways.
For a start, over the many years of development, 3D Realms, the developers, made numerous promises about the game. And with each passing year without a release, speculation and hype grew (at least to begin with). It became almost mythical, and no matter what state or quality Duke Nukem Forever ended up being, it was never going to live up to most people’s expectations.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
Was it worth the wait? Sadly, no, it just wasn’t a very good game.
I can see the same happening with GTA 6. The longer we have to wait, the wilder the speculation gets – especially as Rockstar isn’t giving away much info. So, people are hoping the map is massive, possibly being an entire state comprised of several huge cities, all with buildings that can be entered.
Other people are coming up with ambitious theories about the storyline, and while I think GTA 6 will have a big map and an involving storyline, even with the long development time and huge budget that the team has, it simply won’t be able to live up to some people’s expectations, inevitably leading to disappointment. The longer the delays, the higher these expectations will grow.
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
Turning into a joke
There’s another danger as well. While Duke Nukem Forever’s lengthy development initially built hype and excitement, it eventually took so long that it became an ongoing joke. Even now, it’s often brought up (like I’m doing) when a game gets seriously delayed.
When gamers (and critics) stop being excited about your game and start to joke about it, that’s not a good sign.
Another big issue with long development times is that Duke Nukem Forever continued the bawdy and non-PC humor of Duke Nukem 3D, which was very of its time. In the more enlightened 2000s, that humor fell completely flat.
Meanwhile, in those years while we waited for Duke Nukem Forever, many landmark games were launched, particularly Half-Life and Halo, which transformed our expectations about what first-person shooter (FPS) games could be. When Duke Nukem Forever finally arrived, not only was its humor outdated, but so too was its gameplay.
The longer GTA 6 is delayed, the more work will be required to ensure the story and humor remain relevant.
This is a very real danger for GTA 6. The series has always indulged in edgy humor, but some of the things we laughed at back in 2013 with GTA 5 aren’t quite so funny anymore. The series has also taken great pride in satirizing the world, particularly the US, but that world has changed significantly since then. The longer GTA 6 is delayed, the more work will be required to ensure the story and humor remain relevant.
Gameplay-wise, Take-Two and Rockstar need to be careful as well. Since the launch of GTA 5, it has inspired a huge amount of open-world rivals, and while some of those were pale imitations, others continued to innovate the genre, including Rockstar’s own Red Dead Redemption 2. The further away we get from GTA 5’s release, the less impressed we’re going to be if GTA 6 sticks too closely to its predecessor’s gameplay.
(Image credit: Eidos Interactive)
I’ve been around long enough to see many games that get stuck in development hell, then manage to escape, such as Daikatana, another famous example, only to end up as major disappointments.
Take-Two’s fear of GTA 6 becoming the next Cyberpunk 2077 could end up damming it to an even worse fate. After all, Cyberpunk 2077 eventually found redemption after CD Projekt Red worked hard to fix its faulty launch, while Duke Nukem Forever ended up becoming both a joke and a cautionary tale.
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