There was, I am sure, a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Take-Two delayed Grand Theft Auto 6 from its planned release this year to May 26, 2026—if you're on console, anyway. Expectations are very high, after all, and new GTA games don't come around very often. But just how certain are we of that new date, really? I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is pretty darn sure, because, well, he said so.
"My level of conviction is very, very high," Zelnick said in an interview with CNBC (via Kotaku). "Rockstar does have a lot of other things going on, but this is of course the primary focus."
Zelnick said Take-Two tries not to "pump expectations," which I think is a reasonable thing to say—as game company CEOs go, Zelnick is pretty restrained—although entirely in vain if the goal is to keep those expectations down. As Take-Two noted in its most recent quarterly earnings report (and which Zelnick also referenced during the interview), the first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drew 93 million views on YouTube alone, making it the biggest non-music video debut on the platform; the second trailer, released on multiple platforms, pulled more than 475 million views in 24 hours.
Ironically, after saying Take-Two tries not to pump up expectations, Zelnick pumped up expectations.
"Rockstar's whole stock in trade is to have these extraordinary expectations, and still to beat them," he said. "I know that's their goal. I know it's gonna be an amazing game. The rest we'll see in the fullness of time."
It's worth taking a moment to clock that this is not a carved-in-stone "it'll be there." I myself have had a very, very high level of conviction in the past that one thing or another would work out a certain way—a couple of recent US elections, for instance—and they just seemed to go sideways at the last moment. Bad luck is a bitch sometimes. That said, Rockstar's willingness to tie GTA 6 down to a specific date rather than a vague window—prior to the delay, all we had to go on was late 2025—makes me think that Zelnick's confidence is probably well placed on this one.
We will also presumably see, in the fullness of time, a PC release date for Grand Theft Auto 6, but if you're keeping score at home that time is not yet upon us: Take-Two reiterated in its quarterly report that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch on May 26 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Seires X/S, and—for now, at least—nothing else.
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