As the hoped for pre-orders fail to materialise, the head of Rockstar Games owner Take-Two reveals when GTA 6 was first supposed to come out.
As you may have noticed, there’s currently no sign that Rockstar is going to open pre-orders for GTA 6 this week. They’re the sort of company to make Nintendo seem predictable, so never say never, but right now it’s looking like the emails sent by Best Buy were a mistake and previous talk of late summer are now the best guess for pre-orders, and likely Trailer 3.
The emails were real, but it seems Best Buy made some kind of mistake and jumped the gun, with a verified insider on the GTA Forums implying that Rockstar was as confused by the situation as everyone else.
GTA fans are used to disappointment, so this will just be one more to add to the list, but to rub salt into the wound, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has revealed when exactly GTA 6 was supposed to come out originally – in that favoured timeline where nothing ever goes wrong in the world.
GTA 6 has only ever had two release dates: May 26 of this year and November 19. Zelnick insists that it’s still on course for the latter (but then again, he said that about May as well) but he’s also given an indication of what the original plan was.
According to him the game is roughly 18 months behind schedule and November 19 minus 18 months is… May 19, 2025.
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So if everything had gone optimally the game would’ve been out a year ago today (give or take) and we’d all now be speculating about Red Dead Redemption 3 or GTA 6 DLC or something.
Although the dates happen to line up with this week, Zelnick only said we’re currently ‘about 18 months behind the original date’, in an interview with David Senra, so he wasn’t being very specific.
According to him, there was no actual date for May 2025 or when it was subsequently delayed until autumn 2025. After its second delay it was then given the May 2026 date, which it also missed.
As frustrating as all this is for fans, none of it is surprising, as Rockstar games are always delayed at least twice and, as Zelnick implies, being 18 months behind on such a mammoth project isn’t bad at all.
What is the budget of GTA 6?
Apart from its release date, the other big questions surrounding GTA 6 have been to do with money. There’s been persistent rumours that it will cost up to £100 for the standard edition, but while Zelnick has downplayed the chances he’s never ruled it out entirely.
He’s also never spoken about the budget of the game, which some estimates have put at anything up to $3 billion – almost seven times more than the most expensive movie ever made (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).
However, budgets are notoriously hard to pin down for movies and even more so for games, where they are almost never made public. As such, there’ll probably never be a definitive figure for how much GTA 6 has cost, but latest estimates put it at closer to $1 billion (£745,000,000).
Of course, the price goes up the longer the game takes to make, so fans aren’t the only ones hoping there won’t be any further delays.
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