GTA 6 delayed to May 26, 2026: what Rockstar and Take-Two actually said

Take-Two filed the news with the SEC on May 2, 2025, roughly two weeks before its scheduled full-year results. The statement said Grand Theft Auto VI, which had been expected in Fall 2025, was now planned for release on May 26, 2026, inside the company's fiscal year 2027.¹

Strauss Zelnick's comment in the same filing was supportive rather than defensive: Take-Two said it fully backed Rockstar taking additional time to realise its creative vision for what it called a groundbreaking, blockbuster entertainment experience, and reiterated the company's expectation of a multi-year period of growth built around the game's eventual launch.¹ Rockstar posted its own short note to the Newswire under the headline that the game was now coming May 26, 2026.²

The context

The Fall 2025 window had been on Take-Two's books since May 2024 and had been repeated in every quarterly report since.³ Moving to a fixed calendar date, rather than a new window, was the notable part: it was the first time Rockstar had ever attached a specific day to the game, twenty-eight months after confirming it existed.¹²

The shift also pushed Grand Theft Auto VI out of Take-Two's fiscal 2026 and into fiscal 2027 entirely, which is a materially different planning horizon for a company whose stock price tracks investor confidence in a single title more closely than almost any other publisher in the industry.¹ The announcement arrived through an SEC filing rather than a Newswire post first, which is itself a signal of how tightly this specific date was tied to Take-Two's own financial disclosures rather than being purely a creative or marketing decision.¹

Two weeks then passed between the SEC exhibit and Take-Two's actual fiscal year-end earnings call on May 15, 2025, which meant investors had time to digest the new date on its own before hearing it folded into the company's wider growth story. That sequencing, news first and detailed numbers second, is different from how the second delay was handled six months later.¹

What happened next

That date did not hold either. Seven months later Rockstar pushed the launch again, to November 19, 2026, this time announced alongside a full quarterly earnings report rather than as a standalone SEC exhibit.⁴

How the two delays compare

The May 2025 move is the more unusual of Grand Theft Auto VI's two delays in one specific respect: Take-Two chose to disclose it on its own, ahead of the company's scheduled fiscal year-end results, rather than folding it into the results themselves. That timing suggests the decision was considered material enough to investors that Take-Two did not want it sitting inside a longer earnings call two weeks later.¹

It also set the pattern Rockstar would repeat in November: replace a slipping date with a new fixed date rather than retreat to a vaguer season or year, and pair the announcement with reassurance from Zelnick about the game's eventual quality and the company's financial trajectory rather than an apology alone.¹²

For anyone tracking the game purely through Take-Two's paper trail, the May 2025 filing is also the moment the company's fiscal-year language changed for good: it placed Grand Theft Auto VI inside fiscal year 2027 for the first time, a framing that has not moved even though the exact release date inside that fiscal year has moved once more since.¹