Get ready to do the Silksong release date shuffle all over again: GTA 6's delay just blew up the whole game industry's holiday 2026 plans

Pity the poor studio who dares release day-and-date with Grand Theft Auto 6. If you thought the countless indies who scrambled out of the way of Silksong's launch in August was eye-opening, imagine the feeling of doom that would arise from having GTA 6 suddenly land in your release window. For studios planning a November 2026 launch, that nightmare became reality today when Take-Two announced a new delay.

GTA 6 was originally slated to release on consoles in Fall 2025—around now!—before its initial delay to May 2026. If you look at the major games releasing in May 2026 as of now, you'll notice there's basically nothing because everything is shambling to escape Rockstar's orbit. And while it's true that May isn't usually a busy month for blockbuster game releases, in 2025 we saw Doom: The Dark Ages and Revenge of the Savage Planet hit PC, both of which would be cremated alive in a battle against GTA.

Speaking anonymously to The Game Business on the announcement of GTA 6's first delay, the "boss of one of the world's biggest game publishers" admitted that Rockstar sucks a lot of money and time out of the market and that "we don't want to be anywhere near that."

Another anonymous studio boss speaking to the same outlet described the futility of the scenario: "GTA 6 is basically a huge meteor and we will just stay clear of the blast zone," they said. "We will nudge our releases back or forward three weeks to avoid it. Of course, the problem is everyone is going to do the same. So three to four weeks before or after GTA 6, you’re going to get a load of games dropping content in what they believe will be the safe zone."

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has alluded to the difficulties of launching alongside GTA 6. During an investors call in May, he was asked how Rockstar's delay into 2026 affected the prospects of Battlefield 6. "We wouldn’t launch into a window that we thought truncated the value that we’ve invested into the franchise, or the value that we think our players will derive from it once they jump in and start playing," he said. "I think now, without going too far, we believe that window is clearer than it was before and we feel very good about launching Battlefield in [FY] 2026."

Would Battlefield 6, no matter how good it has proven to be, fare as well if it had been released next to GTA 6? The simple answer is no. And that's not just my opinion: the industry tacitly acknowledges that GTA 6 is a game that will consume mindshare wholesale. If people aren't playing it, they'll be watching videos about it, whether on YouTube or Tik-Tok. PC Gamer will likely be writing about it a lot, even though its PC release is still up in the air. And not just for a couple of weeks, either: the impact radius will nuke mostly everything that dares release within a month either side of it.

We probably won't know what the release schedule for late 2026 will look like until mid next year, and currently GTA 6 is the only confirmed November release. But at a glance, the blockbuster games that could be affected include next year's Call of Duty instalment, Playground Games' Fable reboot, Bungie's Marathon, Steam's current most-wishlisted game Subnautica 2, Capcom's sci-fi action Pragmata, and Bubsy 4D. I don't think any—COD included—would dare release in November, let alone October.

The whole industry needs to shift around this new development. For many, that May 2026 release window might look mighty attractive, but if a studio's production pipeline has been targeted towards the once-safe, now-murderous October / November 2026 release window, there's little chance gears can be shifted quickly enough to release early. No, games won't be released earlier: it's probably true that a lot of games secretly scheduled for the last quarter of 2026 will simply be delayed into 2027.

In some ways, Silksong's abrupt announcement and the subsequent delay of droves of indie titles was instructive. Major publishers and studios normally don't cite other, more popular games as reasons for their own release scheduling (see Wilson's coyness above). But indies are far less shy, and since Silksong was basically the GTA of indies, the scenario provided a kind of lower-level simulation of what must happen behind the doors of EA, Ubisoft and Activision when the enigmas at Rockstar and Take-Two sneeze into their hankies. Today has been disappointing for GTA fans, but for the industry, it's a migraine-inducing catastrophe.