Publishers are reportedly not announcing firm release dates to dodge GTA 6 launch

Grand Theft Auto 6
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
  • GTA 6 is set to release in late 2025
  • Publishers are reportedly avoiding announcing game releases for that time
  • This is due to fears that the GTA 6 launch will negatively affect sales

Rockstar Games has previously confirmed that the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to release in 'fall 2025.' Although there is no official date quite yet, we now know that this news still has had quite an impact on other publishers with companies desperate to avoid a release clash.

A recent Bloomberg article states that "anticipation is so high” for GTA 6 that “some competing game publishers are waiting as long as possible to commit to their release dates for the fall”. This is reportedly so that the publishers can know whether GTA 6 will actually hit its current release window and “keep their own games far, far away" if it does.

Given the huge amount of excitement surrounding GTA 6, it’s not difficult to imagine why. Its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto 5, released back in 2013 and now has sold roughly 200 million copies as of earlier this year - a figure that puts it right at the top of the list of the best-selling games of all time by most metrics.

The game also came bundled with a multiplayer component, Grand Theft Auto Online, which proved highly popular in its own right and rakes in millions of dollars in revenue each year. It’s not unreasonable to expect that GTA 6 will be just as successful, potentially sapping attention away from other games released around the same time and negatively impacting their sales.

So far we’ve only seen a single trailer for GTA 6, which gave us our first glimpse at its setting - the Miami-inspired fictionalized state of Leonida. According to previous leaks, the game will star two playable protagonists. In terms of platforms, we know that it’s coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S.

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Dashiell Wood
Hardware Writer

Dash is a technology journalist who covers gaming hardware at TechRadar. Before joining the TechRadar team, he was writing gaming articles for some of the UK's biggest magazines including PLAY, Edge, PC Gamer, and SFX. Now, when he's not getting his greasy little mitts on the newest hardware or gaming gadget, he can be found listening to J-pop or feverishly devouring the latest Nintendo Switch otome.

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