Take-Two boss says 'we've never regretted' delaying a game following the Grand Theft Auto 6 pushback, says other studios might have better luck if they did the same thing once in a while

The big news of the day, and the month so far, was the delay of Grand Theft Auto 6, from May 26 to November 19, 2026. That's more than a year away from today (which, notably, is roughly the same size of pushback seen in the first GTA 6 delay, which happened in May 2025), but Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive, has no doubt that it's the right move—and thinks some other game companies would be well served by delaying their releases too.

"It's always painful when we slip a date, and we have done so occasionally in the past," Zelnick said during today's investors call. "And we've never regretted it in retrospect.

"I would like to point out that we have some competitors that in the event where more polish was required, and it required slipping a date, they chose not to slip the date. And they did so at their peril."

I have to imagine that Zelnick has one particular game in mind in that spicy-but-vague comment about competitors that should've tapped the brakes and did not. He gave no hint during the call, but the obvious candidate has to be MindsEye, the catastrophically bad action-adventure helmed by former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies. You may recall that Benzies' split with Rockstar was not entirely amicable—Benzies sued Rockstar for $150 million in 2016, alleging that he was unlawfully terminated in 2015—and more recently, he and Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard blamed MindsEye's spectacular failure on "saboteurs," who Gerhard seemed to imply had been sent by Rockstar.

GTA 6: Everything we know
GTA 6 map: Cruisin' Leonida
GTA 6 cars: The lineup
GTA 5 mods: Revved up
GTA 5 cheats: Phone it in
San Andreas cheats: All the codes