Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders went live last week. To some it was a moment of joy, finally after all these years we find ourselves a step closer to the videogame that has been promised to end all other videogames. But for others the one look at the price tag was enough to reality check all previous hype.

And then there was another, smaller camp of players, who were able to have their cake and eat it too, as they pre-ordered GTA 6 and essentially paid nothing for it. Some clever folks had been planning for this day months, even years in advance, and had spent their time searching on Bing (stay with me) to rack up Microsoft points.

Thanks to Bing's reward scheme a few players managed to save up enough points to pre-order GTA 6 at no extra cost; other than the mental and emotional cost of using Bing, which in hindsight may be greater than $100.

"I pre-ordered [GTA 6] using 98,000 Microsoft points," player HugoWheynow explained. "Thank you Rockstar for all the delays, which allowed me to have all these extra months to save my Microsoft points." While another Bing user posted their Microsoft points-paid pre-order depicting the full amount being deducted from their Microsoft account balance.

Thank you, Microsoft Rewards. 😎 from r/MicrosoftRewards

Honestly, those players deserve a free copy of GTA 6, not just for braving Bing, but also for having the forethought to min-max it over the half a year or so. At a push you could earn up to 10,000 Microsoft points (roughly equates to $10) a month, which means if you start now you could at the very least shave some money off of GTA 6's price tag. Who knows, maybe you could even turn it into a reasonably priced game?

Searching on Bing alone can get you around 5,000 points every month. Combine that with opening the Bing app on your phone, playing any game on Xbox Game Pass, complete extra tasks under the 'More Activities' category, and even selling your friend's soul by referring them to Bing and you could be on your way to getting a decent chunk of money off on your GTA 6 pre-order or flat out purchase.

Once you have enough points, or are happy with what you've earned, you can head over to the Microsoft Rewards dashboard, select get my rewards and redeem your points into an Xbox Gift Card which you can then use to purchase GTA 6. All you have to do is weigh up whether using Bing is worth it or not.

When Rockstar announced that GTA 6 preorders would begin this week, everyone started speculating that a new trailer must finally be imminent. After years of leaks and delays, the developer must be planning to finally show at least a little actual Vice City gameplay. But preorders are live and there's no trailer in sight.

Nada. It's wild for Rockstar to be asking us for a minimum $80 to preorder a game it hasn't actually shown any gameplay for, right?

I know it's been over four years since the triple-A class of game started going for $70, and Nintendo's already been asking for $80, but it sure does chafe seeing GTA 6 preorders start at $80, and obnoxiously lock some gameplay behind a $100 "Ultimate Edition" right from the jump. The insult on top of injury is that Rockstar hasn't even shown us the game.

GTA 6 has had two trailers. The first was a 90 second reveal trailer and the second was a 3-ish minute spotlight on protagonists Jason and Lucia, both cinematic and story-focused. Even all those 63 new GTA 6 images were mostly Ultimate Edition ads, character artwork, and photo mode-style shots. We have not seen GTA 6 being played. Not at all!

Yes, we've seen some years-old leaked gameplay. Yes, it's a GTA game so we can probably pretty well guess what it plays like (a long conversation while driving then some snap-to-head gunplay). Dammit it's the principle of the thing though. I feel like I'm getting mugged, and not in a fun GTARP kind of way.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that aside from educated speculation we don't actually know when GTA 6 might launch on PC. So I'm not preordering nuthin' because I don't own a current generation console. It will come to PC eventually, though, and this doesn't bode well for how Rockstar will treat us when it does.

This can't be the first time a publisher has ever had the hubris to sell a game without a gameplay trailer, but it sure looks like the height of arrogance from Rockstar. I suppose it thinks GTA 6 is too big to fail. It's probably right.

Grand Theft Auto 6—which you would be forgiven for thinking is a videogame, but is actually a civilisational event on par with man's exile from Eden—got a big infodump today, ahead of its preorders kicking off. One smidge of that infodump? A treasure trove of new screenshots to market the game's pricier Ultimate Edition, showing off Vice City, protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and a lot of guns 'n' cars.

Obviously, you would like to look at them, and I am nothing if not a servant of your will. So here are all the new screenshots Rockstar has published from GTA 6, divided conveniently by content.

Jason and Lucia

I'll be honest, I find these shots the most exciting. Ever since GTA 4, I've mourned the robust customisation options Rockstar gave us for CJ in GTA: San Andreas. Sure, GTA 5 had a suite of options, but I never felt like Michael, Franklin, or Trevor could get as varied as CJ could back in the day. Here, though? Jason and Lucia can look really dang different, aided in no small part by just how impressive Rockstar's graphics tech has gotten in the 13 years since GTA 5's release.

Guns guns guns

Looks like GTA 6 expands a whole bunch of GTA 5's relatively paltry gun cosmetics, taking a leaf out of Red Dead Redemption 2's book to let you style your weapons of war in all manner of ways. Including putting your names on them. Which seems like a bad thing to do. As a criminal.

Cars

Yes, Rockstar still likes cars a whole bunch, and I must admit they do look very good as they lounge in Vice City's sunset and neon. These are Ultimate Edition screens, remember—small temptations to get you to fork over $100 for the game's rich-guy edition, so if you want to get your hands on a lot of these wheels in particular, be prepared to pay for it.

Stores of Vice City

One of Rockstar's more egregious moves with its preorder campaign is that there are a few fancy customisation shops—tattoo parlours, vehicle mod joints—that will be straight-up closed if you don't have the (more) expensive edition. They do look nice though. Vice City's petit-bourgeoisie look like a classic rogue's gallery of Rockstar freaks and weirdos.

Boats

Florida, remarkably, is surrounded by water, and it sure looks like you'll be spending a lot of your time on the surf as you do your various crimes. My favourite part: that's a damn dolphin, no doubt rendered with Rockstar's classically unhinged attention to detail.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still five months away (on consoles, remember, no PC release date yet) and preorders won't be live until later this week. But that apparently hasn't stopped numerous websites from promising eager fans that they can get early access to the game right now for a price. Lest there be any doubt, cybersecurity company Malwarebytes is warning that they're nothing but a scam.

A report posted today says "a new wave of scam websites" are offering "VIP early access" to the next GTA in exchange for a grossly inflated price of "a few hundred dollars," payable in cryptocurrency. Malwarebyte also shared a few images of the scam sites in question.

One site leverages GTA 6, Mr. Beast, and Lego all at the same time—a powerful combo, no doubt.

But of course, there's nothing to be had. Worse, because payments are made in crypto, there's no way to recover or report the loss. The money is gone and there's no getting it back.

Stefan Dasic of Malwarebytes described GTA 6 as "the perfect bait" for scams like this in his report. Grand Theft Auto is among the biggest game franchises in the world, with hundreds of millions of copies sold, and it's been 13 years since GTA 5. The hype for GTA 6 is enormous, and "scammers simply exploit that excitement."

You might think that this sort of thing is way too obvious for anyone to fall for, but as a wise old friend once told me, you don't know what you don't know. I've been online for almost as long as 'online' has existed, and I write about this stuff for a living—but a 14-year-old with a smartphone, no matter how hip to the scene he may appear, might be tempted to take a shot.

But it's not just kids, to be clear. As the report points out (and as we've all no doubt seen once or twice in our lives), burning desire can overwhelm chilled caution, and verbiage used on these scam sites encourage impulsive decisions. They also look pretty legit, and the situation is further confused by the fact that preordering a more expensive edition for "advance access" to a new release is very common for videogames now.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Dasic said Malwarebytes doesn't have information on how many people are visiting these sites but the bottom line is that, like all scams, they persist because they work.

"I am amazed when I see which scams managed to fool people," Dasic told PC Gamer. "There will always be at least one person that will fall for this—either being too young, or too immature, probably not well informed and just wanting to be the first to have their hands on something before everyone else."

Just about everyone is hot to trot for GTA 6, but keep this in mind and keep a clear head: There is no Grand Theft Auto 6 early access at this point. If Rockstar does announce some kind of premium "advance access" for GTA 6, you should only buy it from official sources. And last but certainly not least, if a site is insisting that you pay with crypto it's time to put your hand on your wallet and head for the door. (That last one is pretty much a universal truth, though, so apply it across the board.)

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, and preorders—official, real, not-a-scam preorders—will begin on June 25. We're still waiting for the PC version to be announced.

I got pretty excited when I saw the gator on the recently announced Grand Theft Auto 6 cover art yesterday, besides from being an icon of Florida, they're also just cute lil guys. But it seems that I'm not as big of a fan as I thought, because there's something not right about that gator.

"Something seemed off with the number of teeth the gator on the cover had (of course it did—why didn't I think of that) so I did a count and it seems the gator has 60 teeth," ITehJelleh says in a Reddit post. For those of you who are thinking "So what", first off, you're just as uncultured as I am, and secondly that's a big difference to how many gators are meant to have.

gta6 from r/GTA6/comments/1u9tdlr/mistake_with_the_gta_6_cover

"Alligators normally have 74-80 teeth so this is way below the normal amount," ITehJelleh adds. Gators do also go through something called continuous replacement, which sees them constantly lose and regrow teeth, they can apparently go through 2,000 to 3,000 teeth in a lifetime. So maybe this gator is just having a rough one, or just a juvenile .

On the flip side, it could just be a silly mistake—but one that has rocked players to their core. "Unplayable," one fan jokes. "This is just going to be another Cyberpunk release." Others join in voicing their disappointment with Rockstar—"pre-order cancelled"—and who can blame them? Gators are sacred.

But how could Rockstar make such a simple mistake? Well, ITehJelleh thinks it could all be part of something bigger: "Could it potentially have a meaning?" Yeah, ok, I'll play ball. What if we're getting another trailer in 60 days, on August 17, or maybe there'll be 60 different dirt bikes to collect in-game. What if the game opens with you having to fight 60 gators? Not sure of any of that really sticks though, maybe it really was just a simple error. Anyways, I'm just going to stick with the moon for all my GTA theories.

It may sound impossible, but the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost over. After a couple of delays, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has reassured fans that GTA 6 will release on November 19 this year, and now we have the pre-order date to prove it.

Rockstar just randomly—hold on a second, let me check what moon phase we're in—yup, randomly announced that pre-orders for GTA 6 will start on June 25, which is just a week away. Everyone, try to keep your composure.

Alongside the pre-order announcement came the official cover art reveal. It's nothing particularly surprising, as it follows the same design we've seen before with multiple fluorescent images spliced onto the cover. It's almost a shot for shot recreation of Vice City's cover art, with a couple of images swapped around.

This time we've got our main protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucua Caminos, a speed boat, a sports car, a helicopter, a hot chick, and then a couple of dudes with guns and motorbikes. Oh, there's also gator, because Florida—I mean Leonida.

Then, if you look extra close at the tattoo under the woman's bikini strap you can see it reads "Vice Baby". This checks out as GTA 6 takes place in the fictional state of Leonida, which is based off of Florida, and will let players return to the sunny streets of Vice City, the fictional city which is based off of Miami.

But aside from nitpicking at the details, players just seem elated to have any new information thrown their way, which is understandable considering we haven't had anything major since GTA 6's second trailer which came out over a year ago now. But now all we have to do is wait one week for pre-orders to open and then 21 more weeks for the game to release—easy!

For reasons I can't quite explain—except to admit that San Andreas was very good—the entire Earth has become one big millenarian cult awaiting the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6, which will purge us of our sins and deliver us to apocatastasis. It will also make four hundred quintillion dollars.

No wonder, then, that its current November 2026 release date squats on the calendar like a big criminal troll, warding off any who come near. No studio wants to release in the vicinity of GTA 6, leading to a very lopsided 2026 release calendar in which every game has tried to squeeze itself into September. Well, every game but one.

"Maybe not *every* publisher," wrote Furyu Games in a post on X, responding to a Kotaku story titled "Sony’s State Of Play Showed That Every Publisher Is Terrified Of GTA 6". Furyu declared, boldly, like its upcoming roguelike Crymelight is due out November 5, two weeks prior to GTA 6's launch (and concurrent with Guy Fawkes Night; he would've been a fan). "Maybe we’re just not afraid enough".

Furyu has form for this sort of thing, as the studio itself notes: "Last year, [Furyu-published] Kemono Teatime launched on September 4... the same day as Hollow Knight: Silksong."

Which is, let's be absolutely clear here, very much a marketing manoeuvre. Being the plucky little studio that picks a David-and-Goliath fight with Rockstar is an arresting image, so arresting that Devolver Digital has made hay doing much the same thing—even moving the release date of an upcoming mystery game in order to make sure it releases on the exact same day as GTA 6.

But it's still pretty funny, if you ask me, and I suspect it's a good move for a smaller publisher whose games don't have GTA 6 levels of hype. Sure, releasing some big AAA thing the same month as "the largest game launch in history" won't do you any favours, but putting out a smaller game? Some of that GTA 6 aura might just rub off on you.

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive (which owns Rockstar, as well as several other companies) has a pretty middling view on AI. He's not purely against it (of course not, he's a CEO), but he's at least been relatively realistic about not only its potential, but also what its adoption will mean for the company as a whole.

Those are comments echoed in an investors meeting (shared here by YouTuber FunThere) wherein Zelnick commented on a hypothetical put forward by another tech bigwig that AI would let a team of three people make a GTA. Zelnick takes issue with the idea that "therefore they will make a hit that's as big as GTA, and there's zero evidence for that."

He continues: "Making hits seems to get harder and harder and harder as entertainment industries mature, we do not have a monopoly on hit creation … Arrogance is the enemy of continued success. I don't believe for a minute that technological advances give someone else an edge or give us an edge.

"It's just the toolset, it's available to everyone. The key thing is that all of this is gonna be totally commoditised. Show me one AI company—just one—who's offering their services or products to companies on an exclusive basis. They don't exist. So when that executive has that button to push, I'll have the same damn button."

Zelnick then gives certain studios the side-eye: "The folks at Rockstar seem to be able to make these massive hits, and lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots including former Rockstar employees—and so far they haven't been able to do it."

He doesn't mention it by name, but it's hard to imagine a higher-profile, recent example of what he's talking about that isn't MindsEye. Here we have a game put together by former Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies' studio, which has spent the past few months trying to convince itself and the public that internal saboteurs are responsible for the fact its first proper game isn't good.

Also by making a DLC where they vaguepost about the supposed saboteurs which, wouldn't you know it, also kinda sucks. Either way, that's gotta sting.

Still, that's not a reason to grow complacent: "Doesn't mean they can't in the future, by the way, we're always running scared. It won't be technology that changes the game. That won't be the change. What'll change is that some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals are gonna show up and do something astonishing.

"Our goal is to get those people to work within the Take-Two system, if we fail to do that? We fail. If we continue to be the home of creativity, the company that welcomes and encourages and supports and finances the best talent in the business, then the rest will take care of itself."

Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar fired 31 employees in October 2025, allegedly—according to the terminated employees—because they were trying to form a union. Rockstar denied those allegations, however, and said the employees were terminated because they revealed "specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles" in "a public forum."

Legal action was filed against Rockstar over the firings, and that matter is still working its way through the system. But one outcome has been reached: Rockstar workers have formed a union.

The Rockstar Game Workers Union (via Game Developer) is a part of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, the union that's been leading the effort against Rockstar on behalf of the employees who were fired in 2025. The union was announced with a play on gamers' longstanding desire for the next Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer: "The video GTA fans have been waiting for."

GTA fans have been on the edge of their seats at the rumours a new video is about to drop…Well the wait is over.We present: the public launch of the Rockstar IWGB Game Workers Union.Our platform, to tell our story.youtu.be/iLOq_6rOpoM

— @rsgworkersunion.bsky.social (@rsgworkersunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T22:29:04.668Z

Instead of a videogame trailer, though, the video recaps the events of the past seven months, from the dismissal of 31 employees last year through protests at Rockstar offices, a commitment from the UK government to investigate the matter, and the legal action filed by the IWGB. And, the union says, rather than impeding unionization efforts, Rockstar's actions only catalyzed them.

"We are now bigger and stronger than ever with more and more workers joining from across every one of Rockstar's sites in Edinburgh, London, Leeds, Lincoln, and Dundee," the narrator states. "Together, we are organizing around the things we want to change, starting with pay transparency, flexible working, and an end to crunch."

The union is also raising funds to pay for its legal case against Rockstar: "We're determined to win justice for the 31 fired workers and to show studios like Rockstar that they cannot get away with this disgusting treatment of the people whose talent, skill, and creativity are what capture their audiences and generate their billions."

Rockstar does indeed expect to earn billions on Grand Theft Auto 6: Parent company Take-Two Interactive said last week that it expects revenues for its 2027 fiscal year to surpass $8 billion, a year-over-year increase of more than $1 billion powered by the console release of GTA 6 on November 19. We're still waiting for official word on a PC version.

I've reached out to Rockstar for comment on the new union and will update after I receive a reply.

The Rage:MP multiplayer platform for Grand Theft Auto 5 says it will begin a "structured shutdown" after receiving a cease-and-desist order from GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive.

The news of the looming closure was shared by the admin team in the Rage:MP forums (via Dextero): "Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have made it clear that FiveM is the only authorized platform for GTA 5 multiplayer modding, as defined in their Platform License Agreement (PLA). In accordance with that policy, and at Take-Two's request, Rage:MP will begin a structured shutdown process. We are asking all server owners to wind down their operations and migrate to FiveM."

FiveM was the big daddy of multiplayer customization modding platforms for Grand Theft Auto 5, enabling players to engage with the game in ways that Rockstar probably didn't envision—like trying to start a GTA Online fight club and ending up with a shirtless gang called The Friendly Boys, for instance, or becoming a big game trophy hunter and then getting murdered in the forest by a psycho who takes issue with your hobbies. (I guess that boy wasn't so friendly after all.)

Rockstar put considerable effort into banning FiveM for violating its policies as "an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy," but eventually (possibly after it noticed all the money trucks that kept rolling by) it relented and bought the Cfe.rx team that makes it instead. In 2025, Rockstar announced Nopixel V, "the next evolution of the GTA 5 Roleplay experience," and now, inevitably, it's also the only permissible GTA 5 roleplay experience.

Rage:MP admins said as a result of Take-Two's request, public access to its server toolkit has been discontinued and no new community servers will be accepted; current owners of Rage:MP servers are encouraged to migrate to FiveM as soon as possible. On June 1, the Rage:MP public server listing will be shut down, and on August 31, everything else goes away: The game client and server toolkit will no longer be available or supported, and all backend infrastructure will be shut down.

"We know this is tough news for everyone—both developers and players," the team wrote in their farewell message. "As FiveM is now Rockstar Games' official platform for modding-based experiences, we've done our best to give you extra time to move your servers to their new home, and we will continue to do everything we can to make the switch over as smooth as possible.

"All of us have put a huge amount of time and energy into building Rage:MP. Thank you for being part of this journey and for everything you've done to help multiplayer grow. Rage:MP was always defined more by the community than by the codebase."

It is rare that I sit down and write one of these 'CEO has spoken' articles with a charitable mind, mostly because I have this irritating habit of punching up, but also because they are, typically, a little divorced from reality. Like the head of Amazon Games saying videogames don't really have voice acting, or Microsoft's Satya Nadella trying to retroactively justify AI for the nth time.

Which is why I have to come forward and say that Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, has been extremely reasonable in a recent interview with IGN. When asked whether or not Red Dead Online is considered a missed opportunity—and it has, admittedly, been less of a breadwinner for the publisher than GTA Online—he had this to say:

"So let me be clear. There is literally nothing about Red Dead selling 85 million units that could signal a missed opportunity. And Red Dead Online has been immensely successful and long lasting."

Furthermore, Zelnick adds, even if GTA Online didn't exist, producing one of the other most successful open-world videogame franchises out there would also be absolutely fine: "I think if we didn't have Grand Theft Auto here at our company, then people would just talk about the fact that we have this massive franchise in Red Dead.

"I actually personally think Red Dead is just amazing and I love engaging with it. And I think the reason it continues to sell is that it's just spectacular entertainment. It's beautiful and it feels very up to date despite the fact that it's not a new title."

As to whether or not Red Dead Online is a little underserved from a player perspective, well—that's another thing entirely. I'm not partial to Rockstar's online games myself, but the PC Gaming Show's own Joe Donelly noted last year that "despite its scope to match the ambition of GTA Online once upon a time, RDO instead persists in the lurching shadow of its modern day cousin."

But that's a bit different from the business-related implication that Red Dead Online is somehow a missed opportunity. I'd argue selling 85 million copies of anything is good enough, even if you never updated its online component ever again.

And while I've got sympathies for RDO's doubtless passionate playerbase, I'm not sure every game with an online slice needs to be a perpetually-maintained live service mill. I even kind of miss the day where superfluous multiplayer modes would come and go—but hey, I'm a games journalist, and my live service fatigue doesn't speak for cowboys, cowgirls, and horse girls everywhere.

Do you remember where you were just over a year ago, on May 6, 2025? That's when Rockstar released its second trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 and also confirmed its updated release date: May 26, 2026. Neither can I, but I do know I was excited as all hell alongside every other gamer, and that's what makes today so painful.

A few months went by before Rockstar made the announcement that the floodgates to Leonida wouldn't open on May 26, instead delaying it for a second time to November 19, 2026, to "allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve."

It's never a bad idea to give developers more time to polish a game, and as Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick previously said: "we've never regretted [a delay] in retrospect." But that doesn't mean the delay didn't leave a mark. Something that plenty of fans have reflected on, especially today.

If you dare venture over to GTA 6's subreddit you'll find a bevy of despairing fans, all mourning what could have been had Rockstar not delayed GTA 6 for the second time. People are reposting Rockstar's initial post about the May 26 release date, grasping at a reality that's no longer there.

There's a mountain of depressing videos. We've got Tobey Maguire's breakdown in Pawn Sacrifice, Al Pacino screaming his lungs out, and an obligatory James Gandolfini scene from The Sopranos.

Today was supposed to be the day for us all to rejoice. 🥺 from r/GTA6

Some dude even got all dressed up in their Sunday best and started queuing outside of GameStop: "I'm waiting in front of GameStop until it opens because they said that the game comes out today but I'm the only one here. I don't get it. I thought that everyone was excited for this game."

"Today was supposed to be the day for us all to rejoice," another player says. "Let's just pray there's no more delays." Well the good news is there won't be any more delays, that is if Zelnick is to be believed (I'd say that's a safe bet). And while I'm not sure I believe all the theorists claiming that Rockstar'll give fans some more scraps to chew on because today is such a special day, at least we only have to wait 176 days until its release—oh god, that's a long time.

Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive has been adamant that the November 19 release date for Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track, but doubts have lingered: The game has already been delayed twice, after all. But at this point it looks solid: With just six months to go, Take-Two reaffirmed the date in today's FY2026 financial report, and said it expects to make a lot—and let me emphasize, a lot—of money on it.

"We believe fiscal 2027 will establish new record levels of operating performance driven by the November 19th launch of Grand Theft Auto 6, along with strong execution across our portfolio," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said. "We expect to sustain this higher level of scale, generate strong cash flows, and deliver long-term shareholder value as we release our robust development pipeline, continue to optimize our live services and capitalize on new business opportunities."

Take-Two does indeed have a lot of very valuable games and properties to its name (come on, BioShock), but GTA is the unrivalled money machine. Consider: Take-Two reported $6.72 billion in revenues for its 2026 fiscal year, exceeding the high end of its guidance range—basically, what it expected to make in the year. Take-Two's guidance for the 2027 fiscal, though, is $8-$8.2 billion, a year-over-year hike of more than $1 billion.

"FY27 is poised to be a breakout year for Take-Two, led by the November 19th release of Grand Theft Auto 6—arguably, the most anticipated entertainment property of all time, and we are excited that Rockstar Games will start their marketing campaign this summer," Take-Two said.

Which makes for an easy segue into the "no news" part of the report: No trailer 3 today, no information on price, and the biggest 'no' of all, no confirmation of GTA 6 on PC.

Does any of that matter? If you're reading this, it's very likely you've already made up your mind about whether you're going to buy GTA 6 (you are), whether you care how much it costs (you don't), and whether you're cranky about this shoddy treatment of PC gamers because you're going to buy it on console on day one anyway (I remain cranky, but you do you). But as a matter of simply wanting to know what the hell is going on? Yeah, I think we're all pretty damn eager for that.

Summer, for the record, starts on June 21. I don't expect Take-Two is going to kick GTA 6 marketing off on that particular day just because Strauss Zelnick said "summer," but I'll be watching, just in case.

Last week, Best Buy sent emails to affiliates that teased a May 18 kick-off for Grand Theft Auto 6 preorders. The emails were presumably sent in error, but that didn't necessarily mean that the date was wrong: If GTA 6 is on target for its November 19 console release date, it wouldn't be shocking for pre-orders to start soon.

Alas, it is May 18 and no Grand Theft Auto 6 preorder button has appeared, and no new trailer has dropped, which some assumed would happen alongside the expected reveal of the price and preorder bonuses.

The day isn't over, but if it were going to happen today, it probably would've by now, I'm sorry to say. We'll update this article if that changes.

Over on the GTA 6 subreddit, users are passing around the "Fell For It Again Award" as expectations have once again been dashed.

I think we probably will get a preorder announcement, or at least a new trailer, relatively soon. Last year's trailer came in May, and it'd be typical of Rockstar to preempt Summer Game Fest with big news rather than participate directly. SGF kicks off on June 5.

Tech CEOs and other Silicon Valley sickos like to present AI as a gift that levels the playing field, making activities accessible to those who'd previously never have been able to rise to the occasion. But what if I told you that making things easier and making things accessible aren't always the same thing.

I could tell you that while vibe coding may raise productivity, it rarely ends in a higher quality product, and just because a dog can now make videogames it doesn't mean anyone has any more chance of creating the next hit game as they did years ago before AI. The tools have been around for a while, but the defining factor is whether people have the time, effort, and passion to put them to use.

But instead of warbling on for the rest of this article I'll just hand it over to Take-Two Interactive's CEO Strauss Zelnick, who recently discussed, during a podcast with David Senra, the myths around AI and the ways in which devs can use this technology in a way which is helpful.

"That was the thesis, that with AI anyone can make a videogame," Zelnick says. "Anyone could make a videogame last week, anyone could make a videogame five years ago, the technology is readily available. You know how many mobile games get released a year? Thousands. You know how many hits get made a year? Zero to five. You know who makes them? Thank you very much, we do.

"You don't need this new technology to make assets, that already exists, it will be quicker to do it. But speed isn't the issue. The technology, prior to AI, existed to clone GTA, but it won't be GTA. It'd be a clone of GTA; clones don't sell. All hits are by their very nature unexpected. That's the most important thing to take away. Things that are data-driven in their entirety can't be unexpected, but that doesn't mean that AI isn't super helpful."

The crux of the issue is that for a videogame to be a hit it has to offer up a new experience. But "datasets by their very nature are backward looking, creativity by its very nature is forward looking". New ideas can be based on existing data, which is where datasets can help inform new ideas, but there needs to be at least one element that does something different to everything else, otherwise there's no incentive for players to try it out. Think of games like Palworld, Marvel Rivals, or even Arc Raiders—these games took an existing idea and added something new to it.

"I would love to say that AI will make it easier, quicker, and better to make hits because who would benefit more than we," Zelnick adds. "We're in the business already, we own IP." But the issue still stands that AI creates "derivative property" and that's simply not as compelling. "AI is really great at asset creation but hit creation isn't asset creation, asset creation is a necessary but insufficient condition for hit creation." So no, the next hit videogame won't come from the hallucinations of an LLM, it's reserved for the hallucinations of some tired dev.

It's hard to imagine Borderlands without all the stylized ink lines and butt stallions, but when the game was first teased nearly two decades ago, it looked much greyer and more brooding—the sort of thing you'd expect from a shooter released in the late aughts. CEO of publisher Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra that the game's final look took a big overhaul that cost $50 million dollars and an extra year of development time.

"We had not turned around the company yet, we had very limited capital, and we were developing a game that was about to be released two months later, which is to say it's done. I mean, we had spent a lot of money," he said in the interview. "The head of the division came into my office and said, 'Look, we just don't think this is good enough and we think we screwed up, and the art style is not appropriate and it's not differentiated, we want to remake the game.'"

While it was a costly risk for Take-Two, Zelnick said he "dug in and did my homework" and ended up supporting the decision, though he noted it was "non-obvious … no one else in the business would have done it."

It's hard to know what factors Zelnick is considering when he claims the delay came with a $50 million price tag, but it's especially surprising to hear given that Borderlands 2 had a budget of around $35 million according to an estimate by Randy Pitchford from back in the day.

I admit I'm curious to know how that original, moody take on Borderlands might have felt in a full game—I was never that sour on beige classics like Quake and Gears of War—but the team's instinct that it was hurting the game was probably right, given that early testers thought the game looked an awful lot like id Software's Rage or Fallout 3 (as you can read about in former PC Gamer EIC Samuel Roberts's full story on the way Gearbox's shooter almost looked). Rage and even Fallout 3 look a bit dated and indistinct now that we can view the dominance of muddy brown shooters in retrospect—love or hate Borderlands, it certainly has a style all its own.

The likelihood of another Grand Theft Auto 6 delay seems a whole lot less, well, likely now, as a reported leak out of Best Buy says preorders for the game—the most anticipated videogame in years, if you haven't been keeping score—will go live next week.

The leak was first reported by content creator Frogboyx1Gaming, who said on X (via Rockstar Intel) that an email sent to his Best Buy affiliate account revealed that preorders will go live on May 18. Things got serious when others chimed in to say they'd received the same email.

Another person has received the BestBuy GTA6 Preorder Email with video proof from r/GTA6

Affiliate links, simply put, are personalized links provided to websites, streamers, and content creators that enable them to earn a commission if one of their viewers orders a product using that link. We use them here at PC Gamer, too—here's our affiliate disclosure, breaking down exactly how it works.

Emails like this give affiliate partners a heads-up on what's coming, so they can prepare for what's coming and maximize their output appropriately. I think it's a safe bet, though, that this particular email was not supposed to go out today—either that, or Best Buy has remarkable (and remarkably misplaced) faith in the gaming community to not leak things.

As with all leaks, this one should be taken with a grain of salt: It's possibly a mistake or a placeholder date, and for those who enjoy conspiracy theorizing, it could even be a bunch of influencers coordinating on a little bit of fun with the tightly-wound GTA community.

That said, it looks legit enough to be worthy of attention: Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive said earlier this year that "launch marketing" for Grand Theft Auto 6 will begin this summer, and that's getting awfully close. The May 18 date is also just a few days ahead of Take-Two's next quarterly report, which is set for May 21, and having GTA 6 fully firmed-up leading into that—as much as possible in an uncertain world, at least—could eliminate a lot of investor and analyst uncertainty.

Of course, all of this is of limited relevance to us here in the world of mouse and keyboard, because Grand Theft Auto 6 hasn't been announced for PC yet. Even so, May 18 will be a day worth watching for at least two reasons. One, if preorders do go live that day, the long-awaited third trailer will surely drop, hopefully with an actual look at the game, rather than just cinematic hype; and two, it will finally reveal the game's price, which has been the subject of speculation and hand-wringing for months now. Is the era of the $100 videogame finally upon us? (I don't think so, for the record, but $80 for the base edition won't surprise me in the least.)

Grand Theft Auto 6, for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, is set to launch on November 19. See you next week.

Cast your mind back to October 2024 and you may remember the time when Russia fined Google a website-breaking amount of money. Like grains of rice on a chessboard, a fine Russia levied against Google for blocking some pro-Kremlin channels had compounded to the point that Google 'owed' the country ₽2 undecillion. That's a two followed by 36 zeroes. That amount was later capped at a more generous ₽91.5 quintillion but, either way, it's more money than there is on Earth.

Which I suspect, as a tactic, was not much of a winner, as Russian courts have turned around and asked for a much more payable fine from EA, Take-Two, Battlestate, and NetEase (via Kommersant) for failing to localise the data of Russian gamers on domestic servers.

Law firm Semenov and Pevzner told Kommersant that Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had filed lawsuits resulting in ₽2 million fines against the four companies, while three remaining lawsuits against Embracer Group, Digital Extremes, and Epic Games are yet to reach a conclusion.

Which is not a lot. At the time of writing, ₽2 million is about $27,000. If the court were to impose the maximum allowable fine against the three remaining companies—₽6 million—that would be just over $80,000.

That's couch-cushion money for companies at this scale, whose revenues are measured in the billions. In the unlikely event any of them were to pay, it would be tantamount to a rounding error on their balance sheets.

Perhaps this indicates that the fines themselves are not the point. A source spoken to by Kommersant suggests that the lawsuits are merely the beginning of a crackdown on foreign-made online games within Russia, a move which would likely redound at least somewhat to the benefit of homegrown games. For its part, Roskomnadzor says it has no such plans, but it would fit the country's previously documented attempts at "digital sovereignty".

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the immense pressure for the game to succeed, given the publisher's massive investment into Rockstar's long-awaited crime caper. He described the risk the company's taking in a way that, unfortunately, I can only describe as going kinda hard.

"Development costs have gone up and up. And we really do aim to deliver the highest quality entertainment on Earth," Zelnick told Bloomberg. "And that is costly. And AI influence is not withstanding. We haven't seen those costs decline yet. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't."

The cost of triple-A development has been a hot button issue this console generation, with increasing technological and graphical complexity demanding correspondingly larger team sizes and bigger budgets. High-profile, expensive sales failures beg the question whether smaller team sizes, shorter development cycles, and cheaper games should be embraced as an alternative.

But Zelnick still wants the publisher to focus on blockbusters, and he seems to accept that you have to spend money to make money. “That's a high-stakes game for big boys only," said Zelnick, "And I'm cool with it.”

It's a turn of phrase that, quite frankly, tickled my fancy. It almost made up for the part of the interview where Zelnick said he sees Xbox and PlayStation as Rockstar's "core" audience, hence GTA 6's customary delayed launch on PC.

"We never claim success before it occurs," Zelnick said, before describing the company's strategy as, "We try to give them unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection." And "unlimited" really seems to mean "unlimited," as evidenced by GTA 6's long gestation, several delays, and eye-watering estimated budget.

Business Insider provided a $1-$1.5 billion figure from anonymous industry analysts in its own feature on Zelnick, but this seems to be the low end of the GTA 6 budget ballpark. In a LinkedIn post from last August, before GTA 6 was delayed from May to November 2026, Josh Chapman of venture capital firm Konvoy cited a $2 billion estimated investment from Take-Two.

GTA 6 O'Clock newsletter writer Dan Dawkins argued that $3.4 billion is a more likely figure, factoring in preproduction and Rockstar's payroll over the last 6 years of development. If that's not a high-stakes game for big boys only, I don't know what is.

Back to Chapman and Konvoy, they predicted that Take-Two would break even within a month, assuming a $2 billion budget, and that the game would rake in $7.6 billion in total revenue within 60 days of launch⁠—and that's before you get to the long tail of sales GTA 6 will presumably have, if the previous game in the series is anything to go by.

2K Games studio 31^st Union has confirmed the layoff of an undisclosed number of employees, first reported by GamesIndustry, as it continues to develop Project Ethos, the free-to-play hero shooter announced in 2024.

In a memo sent to 31^st Union employees and shared with PC Gamer, 31^st Union studio head Ben Brinkman, who left Respawn to take the role in October 2025, said "it's become clear that changes need to be made to our team in order to realize our goals and deliver this experience for players."

"Our success is dependent on our ability to work more quickly and nimbly," Brinkman wrote. "To do that, we've made the difficult decision to scale back our team to better align with where we are in development, which unfortunately means parting ways with some valued colleagues today."

It also sounds like Project Ethos itself is undergoing at least a minor change in direction. It was revealed to the world in October 2024 as a "roguelike hero shooter," although as PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde noted at the time, "it's not really a roguelike: You just get to pick from randomized sets of buffs throughout a match. Otherwise, it's a third-person shooter that resembles Fortnite, but with hero characters who come with unique guns and abilities, and a low-stakes PvPvE extraction mode as its main attraction."

Brinkman, however, described it in somewhat vaguer terms in his layoff message, saying 31^st Union "is committed to building a bold new game with a renewed direction and vision—a skill-based PVP roguelike experience that will challenge and thrill players." He added that the studio has "evolved as a team this past year in what has been a defining period of creative growth."

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I do have to wonder whether 2K has decided that Fortnite-styled extraction/hero shooters are a riskier bet than it seemed a couple years ago. For every Arc Raiders, there's a Highguard (and plenty of others), and not even heavyweights like Bungie are immune from the risks of wading into a genre already dominated by a few major hits: Marathon is a brilliant shooter but it's running one-tenth of Arc Raiders' player counts on Steam, and Sony took an absolute hammering on it.

But it's also notable that this isn't the first time that Project Ethos has shown signs of trouble. Original 31^st Union studio head Michael Condrey was reportedly given the boot just four months after the game was announced, when that reveal—which came just over a month after the disastrous end of Concord, another live service shooter casualty—failed to make much of a splash. And that, as far as I know, was the last we heard of Project Ethos until these layoffs.

The cuts at 31^st Union seem not unlike layoffs made in 2025 at 2K Games studio Cloud Chamber, which is currently working on a new BioShock game. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said he is "deeply disappointed" that it's taking so long to release a new game in the series, adding that "finding the right creative purchase" on the project has been more difficult than expected—something that sounds like might also apply to 31^st Union and Project Ethos.

Despite everything, Brinkman said he's "never been more confident in the future of our game, this team, and the commitment and investment Take-Two and 2K leadership continue to show."

You'd think it would be fairly easy to make a BioShock game: After all, "there's always a lighthouse," as the man once said. Yet it's proven remarkably challenging: After three acclaimed games in relatively quick succession—BioShock in 2007, BioShock 2 in 2010, and BioShock Infinite in 2013—there's been nothing. Efforts have been made: Hangar 13 was reportedly in the early stages of work on a new game in the series in 2018, which even then seemed like an unusually long wait after Infinite. But it fizzled.

In a new interview with Stephen Totilo's Game File, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of BioShock publisher Take-Two Interactive, said he's not, strictly speaking, "surprised" that it's taking so long to get a new BioShock game out the door. But he sure is disappointed.

"Think about what ‘surprise’ implies," Zelnick said. "That’s like, one day, everything’s awesome, and the next day, I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ And I don’t run the business that way. But I think if you’re saying ‘disappointed,’ yes. Deeply disappointed."

Zelnick said the next BioShock game is taking so long because it was difficult "finding the right creative purchase"—that is, a concept the dev team could build out into a fully fleshed-out game. "I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends."

Despite those challenges and the extended timeline that's resulted, Zelnick said he's "feeling a lot better" about the state of the new project now. He may have former Diablo boss Rod Fergusson to thank for that: Fergusson left Blizzard in August 2025 to take the wheel at Cloud Chamber, the studio working on the new BioShock, effectively repeating the "closer" role he played on BioShock Infinite.

Fergusson's arrival heralded something of a reset for the project: 2K Games president said at the time that after several years of development, "we’ve made the decision with studio leadership to rework certain aspects that are core to a BioShock game." The studio also laid off an unspecified number of employees; a Bloomberg report said more than 80 people, representing about a third of the studio's headcount, were put out of work. That was less than a year ago, so while I'm happy that Zelnick is feeling better, I suspect we've still got a long wait before the next lighthouse comes into view.

There are two big questions preoccupying Grand Theft Auto fans these days: Will Grand Theft Auto 6 be delayed, and how much is it going to cost? (If you're a GTA fan on PC, you get a bonus question: What the hell?)

Obviously we'll have to wait for Take-Two Interactive to make the call on those, but a Seeking Alpha report (via IGN) says Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky is calling for GTA 6 to launch at a higher-than-usual price point—for the good of everyone.

Dessouky was speaking in the wake of the Interactive Innovation Conference—stylized as iicon, because cool—a game industry conference for "visionaries, thought leaders, and innovators" (ie., CEOs and money types) organized by the Entertainment Software Association to fill the void in its heart left by the collapse of E3.

"We also heard from attendees that the industry, which is perceived as struggling, would have difficulty selling games for $80 if GTA 6 came out at $70," Dessouky said. "We think it’s in Take-Two's self-interest, as a publisher and partner to many developers, to raise the price point for the entire industry."

Nobody likes the idea of paying more for stuff, especially at a time when stuff in general is growing unmanageably more expensive because of all the other stuff happening in the world. But looking at it strictly from the perspective of someone whose only interest is creating a lot of value for shareholders, Dessouky's point is spot-on: If any game can get away with asking $80 for a basic edition, it's GTA 6—and if Take-Two breaks that seal, it won't be long before others follow. Rising tides, and all that.

Conversely, if Take-Two sticks with the $70 price point, it's going to be very difficult for other publishers to justify charging more for their games, even heavy hitters like Call of Duty and EA Sports FC. I'm not sure that's necessarily bad for the industry—I think there are far more pressing concerns right now than whether multi-billion-dollar corporations can charge an extra tenner for their wares—but Dessouky is absolutely correct that Take-Two, whichever way it goes, will set the path for the rest of the industry.

As for which way it will go, Take-Two is playing coy about the whole thing. Speaking at the same iicon conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he wants to ensure that "what people pay for it feels very reasonable." But he also pointed out that big-budget games could (and, by implication, should) cost more than they do right now, because game prices have held steady over the years while everything else has gone up—which sounds like the sort of thing you say when you're getting to slap your customer base with a little of the ol' sticker shock.

My money, metaphorically speaking, is on GTA 6 coming in at a higher-than-standard price: Not the $100 earthquake that some are dreading, but $80? I'll be very surprised if it's not at least that much. We may finally get some insight on that topic later this month: Take-Two's next quarterly financial report is set for May 21.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will be out on November 19, unless it gets delayed again (never say never), but only on console. There's no doubt that GTA 6 will come to PC eventually, but officially, it still hasn't been announced for our platform and therefore does not exist. Why? In an interview with Bloomberg, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company's priority is "serving the core," and that, apparently, is console.

It's a bit of a strange thing, because leading up to that explanation, Zelnick said that when he started with GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive way back in 2007, PC releases accounted for a tiny portion of the company's overall sales: In the case of the NBA 2K series, for instance, it might make up 5% of total sales. But that's not the case anymore: "Now with regard to a big title, PC can be 45, 50% of the sales," Zelnick said.

So that's half your total sales, and there's no game bigger than GTA 6—so, why is PC (half your total sales!) excluded from the initial launch?

"Rockstar always starts on console because I think with regard to a release like that you're judged by serving the core," Zelnick said. "Like really serving the core consumer. If your core consumer isn't there, if they're not served first and best, you kind of don't hit your other consumers."

I just don't understand that. Serving PC alongside your supposed "core consumer" doesn't exclude or diminish them: They absolutely are there, and the idea that they need to be "served first" or there'll be hell to pay conjures up thoughts of people who get angry because Sony exclusives sometimes come to other platforms: It's just console war silliness dressed up in an expensive suit. And if PC really does represent half your total sales (!), how is that not your core to start with?

There is another possible explanation for Rockstar's console-first-PC-later strategy: As PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield pointed out back in 2024, "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." Ted knows the score, folks.

This is nothing new for us PC gamers: Historically, Rockstar games have taken anywhere from seven months to 14.5 years (yes, years) to make the move from consoles to PC, so it's not like this is some unprecedented slap in the face. It is kind of annoying, though.

Take-Two's next quarterly financial results will be announced on May 21. We'll be listening in, and we'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

As the question of Grand Theft Auto 6's release date dies down (hopefully there won't be another delay), the question of how much it will go for is starting to pop up. Everyone seems to have their own theories, and while I think we'll be seeing a $100 price tag, Take-Two Interactive's CEO Strauss Zelnick has recently qualified that it'll be reasonable.

"Consumers pay for the value that you bring to them, and our job is to charge way way way less of the value delivery," Zelnick said at the Interactive Innovation conference (via IGN). “How you feel about something you buy is the intersection of the thing itself and what you pay for. Consumers need to feel like the thing itself is amazing and the price they were charged was fair for what they got.

"If you look at it through that lens, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But that isn’t the lens through which we look. Instead, we look at how do we deliver something amazing, and how do we make sure that what people pay for it feels very reasonable."

The only problem with this is that I don't think the CEO of Take-Two and someone whose net worth amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars would share my sentiment on what a 'reasonable' game price is.

Zelnick also broaches the idea that games have actually stayed quite cheap, mostly thanks to the fact that prices haven't risen with inflation over the last decade or so. Major releases have stayed at $60/$70 for quite some time now, which is impressive when compared to prices outside the industry.

While technically true, all that seems to me is Zelnick laying the groundwork for why GTA 6's standard edition will be priced higher than any other AAA game, I dread to think what its premium editions will cost. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, for now, at least, Zelnick seems slightly more concerned with GTA 6's reception rather than its price.

During the conference Zelnick confessed that he's "terrified" of the prospect of how on earth they'll be able to measure the success of GTA 6. Instead the team is just focusing on doing the best it can do to ensure it performs well and looks good.

"What we think about is making the most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth, in history—and it’s a pretty daunting challenge," Zelnick adds. "If we do that, and if we’re of service to our customers, then the upside will take care of itself."

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive was recently asked about the integration of AI within games like Grand Theft Auto 6, what its actual use case is, and what it means for artists and other developers. Surprisingly, Zelnick isn't worried about the job security of his artists, instead he's more concerned about the richest man in the world.

"If AI were going to get rid of employment, the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, knows a little something about AI, last time I checked," Zelnick says during an interview at the Semafor World Economy 2026 panel. "He has unlimited financial resources and he has unlimited human resources and he has, apparently, an unlimited amount of ideas, he also knows his way around AI. The man works 20 hours a day, if AI were going to take anyone's job wouldn't it take his job, the richest guy on Earth. Wouldn't that be like job number one for AI to take. Why is he so busy?"

"Maybe Elon Musk is indeed a simulation, it's possible," Zelnick adds. "I mean in fairness if you were going to choose one person who was a simulation he would be my number one choice."

On the other hand, Zelnick seems to think that AI will be nothing but a help to his artists, as it acts as the heavy lifter, taking mundane jobs away from devs: "The three part strategy of Take-Two is 'Be the most creative. Be the most innovative. Be the most efficient' and we think AI informs all three. Briefly on creativity, anything you can do that reduces mundane work means our creators can do more exciting work."

We've actually seen some developers use machine learning to cut out the busy work, such as World of Warcraft. Franchise director John Hight previously explained that while WoW isn't fully buying into the generative AI rush the team is prepared to use machine learning to automate certain processes. A good example of this is how 2018's Into the Spiderverse used machine learning to help redraw thousands of comic book ink lines on existing panels.

"When I started in the videogame business which was, believe it or not, in 1993, if you wanted to create a lawn, an artist had to create individual blades of grass otherwise it would look like concrete," Zelnick continues. "Today, pre-AI, if one of my artists, and I have many thousands of them, want to create a lawn, they press the lawn button, and AI does that on steroids.

"So what does that mean? That does not mean that all of my artists are out of work. No, they won't be out of work, they'll be doing higher quality work, they don't care about lawns anymore, they care about this incredible creature."

This idea that artists will be able to focus on the bigger picture or more complex issues is not wholly reassuring. The interview even posits the question of what happens when AI evolves to have a "creature button", essentially swallowing up even more artistic jobs.

To this Zelnick replies: "The creature button is going to take data using AI which is backward-looking and we need to make creatures that are forward-looking to make hits. And so our creators have to do that."

That's all well and good for Take Two, but there's no guarantee all publishers will have the same guidelines and will favour forward thinking human-made art over mass manufactured designs which are cheaper and faster to create. The gaming industry's track record isn't exactly reassuring.

But Zelnick still stays firm in his opinion that AI won't actually rob artists of their jobs: "For those of you who think you're going to be made unemployed by AI, two things: technology creates productivity, productivity creates GDP, GDP creates more employment. Remember the paperless office? We were promised because of digital technology we'd have a paperless office. We use more paper in offices today than ever before."

To round it all off, Zelnick asks one more question: "And by the way, why am I working harder than ever despite the fact that I've totally accepted AI into every part of my life?"

Perhaps it's because many current AI tools aren't actually meant to help productivity. They're more a Trojan horse whose sole use case is to worm its way into every part of our day regardless of efficiency, because it's developed by people who have bet too much money and their own professional credentials on its success, and anything other than complete infiltration wouldn't be enough to justify the cost spent. But I don't know, that's just a thought.

Rockstar Games was hacked earlier this month, and given an ultimatum: Pay up a significant amount of cash—$200,000, apparently—or all the stolen data gets released into the wild. $200 large is couch change for Rockstar, but there's also the principle of the thing to consider. Rockstar refused, and the hackers made it rain with their ill-gotten data—which turned out to be something of a wet fart.

It was interesting, for sure: Rockstar earns half a billion (yes, with a b) per year on GTA Online, and PC players account for a very small portion of that, less even than players on the old Xbox One console.

But the anticipated GTA 6 treasure trove simply wasn't there: Rockstar said when the hack occurred that "a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed," and it sure wasn't kidding.

Take-Two's share price took a nice little bump over the next couple days, jumping from a close of just over $201 on April 13 to open at nearly $208 on April 14, and then after settling at $205 at close on April 14, bouncing again to more than $210 to open April 15, and climbing through the day to close at $214.38. Not bad!

But, I think it bears noting, also maybe not as spectacular as it might appear at first blush. It's been a pretty good week for Take-Two, but year-to-date the company is still way down from where it was trading in January, when Take-Two's share price surpassed $257—a drop of more than 16% from January 1. Not good!

At least one analyst attributed the short-term boost in Take-Two's share price to the data leak reminding us just how much money the company makes on GTA Online—it really is a monster. And it's undoubtedly good news, for Take-Two's marketing plans at least, that no GTA 6 data was revealed.

But how much of a material impact that absence had on the big picture is very hard to say, because there are so many factors at play. At the end of January, for instance, Take-Two and other game-related stocks took a notable dip when Google rolled out its world-building AI thing called Project Genie; like most other sound-and-fury AI sales pitches, Genie doesn't actually do anything useful at this point, and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick did his best to shrug it off, but the company's share price took a knee to the bits anyway.

Take-Two's next quarterly financial report will happen in early May, and that's where things will get interesting. Another GTA 6 delay is always possible, and maybe we'll finally get an official PC announcement, although given what we saw in that leaked data I'm not holding my breath.

But as Zacks Equity Research (via Yahoo Finance) notes, the money people who actually drive these graphs up and down will be looking at other things:

"Investors will be eagerly watching for the performance of Take-Two Interactive in its upcoming earnings disclosure. On that day, Take-Two Interactive is projected to report earnings of $0.58 per share, which would represent a year-over-year decline of 46.79%. In the meantime, our current consensus estimate forecasts the revenue to be $1.55 billion, indicating a 1.94% decline compared to the corresponding quarter of the prior year. TTWO's full-year Zacks Consensus Estimates are calling for earnings of $3.91 per share and revenue of $6.67 billion. These results would represent year-over-year changes of +90.73% and +18.16%, respectively."

What does that mean? Very broadly and basically, if Take-Two surpasses various financial forecasts, people are happy and the number goes up; and if it does not, people are sad and the number goes down. Unless a guy who calls himself deepfuckingvalue kicks in the door and screams "Stonks!" at the top of his lungs, I suppose, in which case all bets are off and nobody will be able to explain why even as multi-billion-dollar hedge funds are incinerated in full public view. (This is why I generally stick to game delay announcements.)

Speaking of which, we'll be tuned in when Take-Two makes its next financial report in May, and we'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

The Grand Theft Auto series has taken us to many corners of the United States, giving us somewhat satirical glimpses into a ridiculously violent, weird, and exaggerated world. But it's been 13 years since GTA 5 was released, and a lot has changed since then.

So much has changed, in fact, that Lester's voice actor from GTA 5, Jay Klaitz, seems to think that "the impact is taken out of GTA 6's initial landing" thanks to just how weird the world has become (via GamesRadar).

"Don't get me wrong," Klaitz says in an interview with El Dorado. "It's still fucking GTA. It's going to be massive. People will lose their shit. It's going to be huge, obviously. But it's a different world to the one 13 years ago when the last one came out. I mean, it's a very different world than it was even a year ago."

GTA 6 is set in the modern made-up state of Leonida which is based on Florida, including locations like Vice City and areas based on the Everglades, the Florida Keys, and more rural places like national parks. There's only been a couple of glimpses into what this will manifest into, but pretty much everything we've seen in these shows GTA 6 taking on the spiritual manifestation of 'The Florida Man', and the curse energy that exudes.

The first GTA 6 trailer depicts Leonida in all of its chaotic wonder. Complete with flashy concerts, pool top parties, alligator infested gardens, and a bunch of clips you'd probably watch on World Star. It seems as if there's plenty of ammo in Rockstar's arsenal as-is, but Klaitz points out yet again that what was ridiculous a decade ago doesn't really hit the same level nowadays.

"What seemed so far-fetched and insane just a short while ago now feels like just another day," Klaitz adds. "So maybe GTA 6 can't make that same splash as previous games, what we see happening in the real world is definitely going to make it harder for a GTA game to work those angles.

"That said, I don't know. Maybe that's bullshit. I know there will be plenty of commentary and satire woven into it. There's a lot of the Florida Man stuff and lots of territory like that still to cover."

The world may be an ever-increasingly strange and depressing place to live in, and that may make what we'll encounter in GTA 6 less wacky, but I'm still not worried. I have a feeling that GTA 6 will still come out with some S-tier lines and characters, it's just a matter of how the devs manage to do it.

Take-Two Interactive has seemingly laid off its head of artificial intelligence, alongside an unspecified portion of its AI team, just two months after CEO Strauss Zelnick said the Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher was "actively embracing generative AI".

Luke Dicken joined Take-Two as its AI head in January last year following a decade at Zynga, which was acquired by the owner of Rockstar Games in 2022. Less than 18 months into the role, however, Dicken revealed that he and Take-Two were parting ways.

"It's truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with T2—and that of my team—has come to an end," Dicken wrote in a LinkedIn post (via Kotaku). Dicken stated that he would "make a more reflective post" upon his time at Take-Two at a later date, but for now was focused on helping support the members of his team also affected by the shakeup:

"We've been developing cutting edge technology to support game development now for 7 years. These folks know how to match innovation and novel problem-solving approaches with strong product design chops to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow."

The nature of Dicken's role at Take-Two is not entirely clear. But according to his LinkedIn page, his position at Zynga shifted from data and strategic scientist to spearheading the company's generative AI strategy, first exploring "the intersection of AI and mobile games", before leading "various initiatives exploring and harnessing modern AI systems such as LLMs and Diffusion Models". This latter role apparently included "ensuring that all executive stakeholders across the business, including Take Two C-suite, are fully briefed on the actionable opportunities as well as the legitimate concerns".

Dicken didn't specify the exact number of people leaving Take-Two from his department, nor the reasons behind the change. But it's a further twist in Take-Two's curious relationship with generative AI, which has often appeared ambivalent and has become more confounding in recent months.

In March 2025, Strauss Zelnick stated he wasn't "worried about AI creating hits, because it's built on data that already exists", adding the technology was "backwards-looking", which doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic. Later that year, after Take-Two's stock price took a hit following the reveal of AI world model Google Genie, Zelnick further commented that there's "no evidence" generative AI tools can create great entertainment by themselves, specifically pointing out that "generative AI has zero part in what Rockstar Games is building" with Grand Theft Auto 6.

Zelnick has appeared more enthusiastic about the tech in 2026, emphasising the company's exploration of it in a recent investor call. "We're actively embracing generative AI," he said following the company's Q3 financial report, adding that Take Two has "hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including with our studios."

That doesn't sound like someone about to let a significant portion of his AI team go. Does this mean the pilot schemes have failed? It's difficult to say. But the broader AI industry has hit some bumps in the road of late. Last month, OpenAI discontinued its Sora video app, with Disney pulling out of a $1 billion investment deal at the same time. And earlier this week Oracle, one of the darlings of the AI boom, was reported to be laying off around 10,000 people.

Industry analyst Matthew Ball, who recently released a "State of Videogaming in 2026" report saying games are "losing the attention war," also predicted that in-game advertising will become more prominent in PC and console games, as developers and publishers seek out new revenue streams. He reiterated that point in a subsequent interview with The Game Business:

"2K said last year that two and a half billion games of NBA 2K are played a year. I don’t know what 2K is thinking, but EA has teams working on ad deployments. If we think very basically… that’s two and a half billion games that were match made and have some loading screen. That’s such an extraordinary amount of inventory. Would Ford Mustang or The Avengers or Old Spice pay some pretty material sum for that inventory with a targeted, valuable audience? Of course."

It sounds kind of terrible to my ears, but not really unreasonable, given the way things are—which is to say, kind of terrible. It does sound unreasonable to at least one person, though, and his opinion counts for a lot more than mine: Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said in his own interview with The Game Business that he's really not interested in the idea.

"For free-to-play titles, yes," Zelnick said. "For titles for which you’ve paid 70 or 80 bucks? No. We have some limited advertising inside games like NBA 2K because it fits with the vernacular. You want to see advertising in a stadium, because you would if you were there in real life. But that’s not a big economic contributor.

"It’s difficult for me to believe that we would want to have interstitial advertising in a game that someone paid 70 or 80 bucks for. It would seem unfair."

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that "fairness" is sometimes a flexible concept, especially in the world of big business, where everything, including high-minded principles, ultimately bows before the glowering god of commerce.

But it's also fair to say that Take-Two basically is the glowering god of commerce: Zelnick also predicted that every console-owning adult on the planet is going to buy Grand Theft Auto 6, and hey, he's probably not too wrong. Hopefully us PC gamers will have the same opportunity someday, but for now Take-Two and Rockstar are staying annoyingly mum about it.

We're starting to zero in on the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. We've been given the run-around over the last year or so with reschedules and delays, but now we've got the November 19 release date—for consoles, we're still waiting for word on a PC version—and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has assured fans that this is going to be the real one, for sure.

Now we know when GTA 6 will be in the hands of us mere mortals, Zelnick says the real question is how many of us do you think can score a sick day, and how many records will the game break.

Because Zelnick is so sure of GTA 6's impending success that he literally cannot fathom a world in which a gamer who can play it chooses not to. "If you have a console and you're over 17, just explain to me how it is that you've decided, 'No, no GTA 6, [I'm] not interested?'" Zelnick says in an interview with The Game Business (via GameSpot).

I'm not a betting man but I'd certainly say GTA 6 getting a shed load of players on release isn't a stretch by any means. However, I'm not so sure I'd extend it so far as to say every eligible gamer will, without a doubt, be playing GTA 6.

Some gamers just aren't interested in the world that GTA offers. You've got your hardcore political sim lovers, cosy gamers, and people who exclusively play The Sims. But even with that in mind Zelnick is unwavering in his assertation.

"It's not happening," Zelnick continues. "We stay engaged with the kind of entertainment we fell in love with at 17. Think about it, if I say to you, 'What kind of music do you like?' Like everyone else, you'll say, 'Oh, I listen to everything.' That just isn't true, incidentally. But if I say, 'Okay, you're by yourself, you have an hour, and all you're going to do in this hour is listen to music,' and [I say] that I want you to have the best possible time and the most relaxing time, you will listen to the music you listened to at the age of 17.

"If you fell in love with videogames at 17 and you're 40, guess what you still do? Play videogames. That is why the [gaming] cohort is continuing to grow as we age. I know [gaming investment advisor] Matthew Ball doesn't believe that, but our experience here at Take-Two is that we are benefitting from industry tailwinds."

Ok, sure. There'll be plenty of older gamers excited to play GTA 6 and rekindle their nostalgic love for games, but what about the young'uns? You know, those degenerate youths who weren't even alive for the release of most of the GTA games. Well, Zelnick isn't worried about that either.

"I think we're gonna have a lot of 17-year-olds playing GTA 6," Zelnick says. "I don't think there's any risk of [them] being like, 'Oh, I didn't play [GTA] 5, or 4, or 3, or 2, or 1, I'm not showing up [for 6].' To the contrary, I think we'll be able to engage every appropriate individual in GTA 6." So there you have it folks: In Zelnick's ideal world, every gamer will, undoubtedly, be playing GTA 6. I think it's going to be mandatory at this point.

Asha Sharma's elevation to CEO of Microsoft Gaming following Phil Spencer's surprise retirement caused consternation among some gamers because, well, she's not a gamer. Sharma only joined Microsoft in 2024 as president of its CoreAI product, and prior to that she was chief operating officer at Instacart and a vice president of product and engineering at Meta—a sharp contrast to Spencer, who waxed nostalgic about the games he loved as a kid when Microsoft plopped down $68.7 billion to buy Activision Blizzard.

One person who says he's not concerned, though, is Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick. Asked during an interview with The Game Business what he thinks Sharma should be focused on, Zelnick, who's been heading up Take-Two for nearly 20 years now, brushed off the idea entirely.

"I don't think the newly appointed head of Xbox needs any advice from me," Zelnick said. "She’s a highly accomplished executive who’s done just great without ever having met me. I’m going to bet on her continuing to do great. Moreover, I have to focus on myself doing better, before I talk about other CEOs."

Zelnick himself was not a 'games guy' when he took over Take-Two. He began his career at Columbia Pictures, served as president of 20th Century Fox and then BMG, and took the wheel at Take-Two by way of his private equity investment firm, ZMC.

In the years since, Take-Two became one of the biggest publishers in the business, and is right now the only one in the West that isn't either on life support or hoovered up by an even bigger-money entity.

"When I first became President of Fox, I was just responsible for the business side. My boss was the chairman, Joe Roth, and he was responsible for the creative side," Zelnick said. "If I did my job well running the business, and Joe did his job poorly running the creative, we would fail. If he did his job well, and I did my job poorly, we would succeed. And if we both did our jobs well, we would succeed mightily. And we did, thankfully.

"But the truth is that hits cure all ills. In the absence of making hits, you won’t have a successful entertainment business. That’s the thing to focus on. At Take-Two, we try to do all of the above. We try to run an amazing creative enterprise, and we try to run a highly rational, highly effective business enterprise. Sometimes we get it wrong, but that’s what we try to do."

Zelnick's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, I feel like I sense a small undercurrent of advice in there—and yes, you could argue that 'make hit games' is easy to say when you're the Grand Theft Auto company, but it's an approach Zelnick seems to take seriously. Take-Two seemed to be aiming for more high-minded things when it launched the Private Division label in 2017, but seven years later it offloaded the whole thing because, as Zelnick said at the time, "We are top-ten hit makers around here," and the indie-focused Private Division simply didn't fit into that calculus.

Around a month ago Rockstar launched an official mod shop for Grand Theft Auto Online, with Cfx Marketplace coming three years after the studio's 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, a GTA and Red Dead Redemption modding team. This is obviously something of a dry run for the company before the all-conquering arrival of GTA 6, with a new GTA Online presumably not far behind: Rockstar has seen that Roblox money, and would sure like some of it.

Now, and perhaps inevitably, comes the news that the GTA 5 multiplayer platform alt:V Multiplayer is going to be closing down this summer after nine years, apparently after Rockstar owner Take-Two started making threatening noises in its direction. The alt:V team describe their work as "a free modification for Grand Theft Auto 5 that lets you play on dedicated servers with custom gamemodes." In other words roleplay servers, and yes that's pretty similar to what FiveM offers.

"This is not an easy message to write," writes alt:V team member Vadzz on Discord (thanks, GamesRadar+). "For the past nine years, we've been building alt:V—starting as a small side project and growing into a full-scale multiplayer platform used by hundreds of servers and thousands of players around the world. It's been years of solving hard problems and trying new ideas."

But it seems like the alt:V team got an offer they couldn't refuse. "Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have made it clear that FiveM is the only authorized platform for GTAV multiplayer modding, as defined in their Platform License Agreement (PLA)," continues Vadzz. "In accordance with that policy, and at Take-Two's request, alt:V will begin a structured shutdown process in 2026."

No new community servers will be accepted from March 2, and public access to the toolkit will be discontinued. The alt:V team recommend all server owners using it begin "planning their migration to FiveM as early as possible."

Come May 4, the public server listing will disappear, and by July 6, "all remaining community servers are expected to cease operations." All servers must have migrated by that point, because the "backend infrastructure will be permanently shut down."

The PLA referenced in the shutdown message was updated last month alongside the official launch of Cfx.re, so this seems related, though in all honesty the site will have been on Rockstar's radar for years. Rockstar and Take Two are traditionally hostile to modders, and indeed before it bought FiveM accused them of hosting code to "facilitate piracy", and banned three of the main creators from Rockstar games.

Rockstar's policy changed in 2022 as someone over there woke up to how potentially profitable the whole GTA modding and roleplay scene is. For a while it allowed non-commercial roleplay servers, as long as they didn't interfere with official services, but it looks like those days may be behind us.

Unfortunately them's the risks when you mod the biggest game on the planet. The next GTA Online will make more money than Croesus, and Take-Two wants as much of it as possible. Which is fine, but it absolutely sucks that the company feels the need to shut down what is a relatively niche community: as I look at alt:V now, there are just under 750 people playing on various servers. Alt:V doesn't exactly feel like something that was ever going to stop Strauss Zelnick from buying another ivory backscratcher, but RIP anyway.

After a couple of delays you might have heard about, Grand Theft Auto 6 is still scheduled for a November 19 release date on consoles, which will be music to the ears of anyone with a few million bucks in Take-Two stock (that's most of you, I assume). Still, maybe you're a bit yippy, and need extra reassurance—even after a T2 press blast a few days ago—that Rockstar really means it, this time.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick hears your cries. In a recent chat with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Zelnick pointed out that, look, the company must be confident in the November 19 date, because it's spent all this goshdang money on marketing the game in the lead-up time.

"We have marketing beats coming this summer, and we don't spend money on marketing until we're pretty close to release," said Zelnick. To be clear, he means more than just putting out a slick trailer in the tail-end of 2023. Think ads on buses, billboards, a never-ending feast of GTA 6 imagery jammed in your eyes and ears for months on end. It'll be fun!

Asked if Take-Two really needs to bother marketing a game that's already bigger than god, Zelnick demurs that "I think there's a difference between awareness and energy, and we need to create the energy.

"The anticipation is huge, it's bigger than ever before, but in our business, you do have to tell people what's coming… our consumers want to know that this is going to be great and they want to see what the visuals look like." I think we kind of already know what the visuals look like, but I'll cut Zelnick some slack: he's explaining things for a CNBC audience who probably aren't too au fait with games.

He does get a little philosophical with it, mind you. Zelnick says Take-Two isn't just out there doing marketing in order to get you hype to drop an unknown amount of dollars on GTA 6, it wants "the product to be authentically owned by our consumers."

Which, yeah, I think is just a highfalutin way of saying they want you hype to drop an unknown amount of dollars on GTA 6, sure. "The marketing has to be delicate. It has to feel like this is real. We're not selling hamburgers. We're selling this unique art form." And they're selling it on November 19. Don't let anybody tell you different (unless it's Strauss Zelnick).

There was a spot of consternation over Google's new AI-powered world builder Project Genie earlier this week: In the immediate wake of the software's announcement, the share prices of a handful of companies, including game engine maker Unity and Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive, took a notable tumble. During today's investors call following its Q3 financial report, however, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he's not sweating it, and he's a little confused about why anyone else is.

"The videogame business, since its inception, was built on the back of machine learning and artificial intelligence," Zelnick said during today's call. "We create our games in computers, with technology, and ever since questions began about generative AI about 18 months ago, I've been incredibly enthusiastic about what the future can bring.

"As it happens now, we're actively embracing generative AI. We have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including with our studios, and we are seeing opportunities to drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and create the opportunity to do what digital technology has always allowed, which is, mundane tasks become easier and less relevant, which frees up our creators to do the more interesting tasks of making superb entertainment."

It's not clear exactly what Zelnick means that the videogame business was built on machine learning since its inception—machine learning has been a research subject for a long time but I don't think anyone considers neural networks to be the foundation of game development—but his point seems to be that videogames have always chased the cutting edge of computing tech.

He also expressed hope that, as generative AI grows increasingly useful as a tool to promote innovation and efficiency in the development process, it will eventually do the same on the creative front, "as it allows our creators to use digital tools to expand what we do, to make it even more beautiful, and even more engaging, and even more exciting."

Zelnick has previously been a relative skeptic about the capabilities of AI. He's equated generative AI to extant digital tools in the past, and has been vocal about what he perceives are its limitations: In October 2025, for instance, he said AI seems so extraordinary now because it's "a combination of metadata with a parlor trick," and prior to that he declared that he's not worried about AI creating hit videogames "because it’s built on data that already exists. It’s backward-looking. Big hits are forward-looking and therefore need to be created out of thin air." He also pointed out in February 2025 that, very simply, "there's no such thing" as artificial intelligence.

There's still an aspect of that doubt in the way Zelnick leans into 'AI as a creator's tool' in these most recent comments, rather than, say, predicting a future where billions of people are vibe-coding games, or... whatever. But the explicit suggestion that generative AI can fundamentally improve the work of human artists and game developers, rather than simply making flowcharts less messy, lands as notably more enthusiastic about the technology than I've seen in the past.

Later in the call, Take-Two president Karl Slatoff echoed Zelnick's comments, saying Project Genie "is very exciting technology" but that the core question is how it can benefit game developers.

"It certainly doesn't replace the creative process, and I would say, it looks to me more like procedurally generated interactive video at this point," Slatoff said. "There are limitations, and Google has said as much."

"There are so many more elements to game development that go beyond, quote, 'world creation' ... Even beyond world creation, there's everything else that's involved. There's the storyline, there's emotional connection, there's vibe, there's mission structure—all of those things, you cannot capture through AI, and certainly not through a world builder. So that's just a very, very small component of what we do, and if this tool bears out, it will make a component of what we do all that much better and more efficient."

If nothing else, it will make the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 a little more interesting for AI detectives. That, by the way, is still slated to happen on November 19 on consoles, and not slated to happen at all (yet, but it will be, just be patient) on PC.

I thought perhaps Grand Theft Auto 6 might be delayed in today's Take-Two Interactive financial report (and I was not alone on that), but it did not happen: The game remains on track for release on consoles on November 19, and Take-Two said in today's announcement that proper marketing for the game will begin this summer.

Grand Theft Auto 6 was made official in 2022, and it's been slim pickings in the years since: Two promotional trailers, a superficial infodump on the cast and setting, and not much else. By all appearances GTA 6 looks very much like a Grand Theft Auto game (and what else would you expect?) but even knowing what's coming in the broad strokes, the fans want details.

Well, they're coming. "Our execution throughout fiscal 2026 has been extraordinary and we are highly confident as we approach fiscal 2027—which promises to be groundbreaking for Take-Two and the entire entertainment industry—led by the November 19th release of Grand Theft Auto 6 with Rockstar’s launch marketing set to begin this summer," Take-Two said in today's press blast.

Generally speaking, you don't kick off advertising campaigns (or even commit to kicking them off) unless you're pretty sure the associated product is going to be ready to go: That's a mistake CD Projekt made with Cyberpunk 2077, and once it's eager to avoid repeating.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick sounds pretty hot about the whole thing, too, as he announced the company is raising its financial outlook for the year: "With ongoing momentum across many of our businesses, and the highly anticipated launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 on November 19^th, we continue to project record levels of net bookings in fiscal 2027, which we believe will establish a new financial baseline for our business, set us on a path to enhanced profitability, and provide further balance sheet strength and flexibility."

So that sounds pretty cool, if you're a Take-Two shareholder at least. Alas, all of this remains academic for those of us on the PC gaming front: A PC version of Grand Theft Auto 6 remains unannounced.

GTA 6 has been delayed twice already, and 2026 kicked off with speculation that yet another delay was imminent. That, as PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde explained, arose from a misinterpretation of a comment made by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, but even so some fans are clearly on edge.

One redditor in this thread, for instance, says "the fact that they haven't released any BAD news yet is already good news," leading another to counter that "to me it seems like the lack of communications is bad."

There have also been reports that while the digital release of GTA 6 will go ahead as planned, physical editions will be held back until sometime in 2027 to prevent leaks caused by retailers selling the game ahead of its scheduled release. That theory is at least grounded in the reality of game releases: Even when no harm is intended, it is really easy for stock in the back to end up on the sales floor (all it takes is one guy who didn't read the memo, and trust me, I speak from experience), and at that point the floodgates are open.

A lot of the nervous hand-wringing is driven by Take-Two's tight-lipped approach to Grand Theft Auto 6 (and everything, really): We've had two trailers, a broad rundown of the setting and cast on the Rockstar website, and not much else. Some GTA doomsayers view the lack of specifics as a sign that said specifics are still being nailed down; I don't think that's terribly likely, but the fans want something and so far they're not getting it.

For myself, I wouldn't bet on another delay but I won't be terribly surprised if it happens. Take-Two could let GTA 6 slip into early 2027 and still have it release in the company's fiscal year, minimizing its disruption on the company's finances.

Pushing it back a few months would also mean missing out on the 2026 holiday quarter, but does Grand Theft Auto 6 need the holiday quarter? Or is it more accurate to say the holiday quarter needs Grand Theft Auto 6?

On the PC gaming side of things, it's all academic anyway: A PC version still hasn't been confirmed, and even if Take-Two gives us the thumbs-up tomorrow, it's a sure thing that it won't be out until sometime in 2027—and maybe even later.

Whatever happens, I think this guy has the right idea.

Comment from r/GTA6

We'll have our eyes open for Take-Two's Q3 financials tomorrow—they usually drop around 1 pm PT/4 pm ET—and we'll let you know how it goes.

We expressed concerns about Bully Online, a massively ambitious mod that promised to bring multiplayer and a host of new systems to Rockstar's classic school sim, when we ran across it in November 2025. It looked great, but the initial release was limited to people willing to pay for it through the mod team's Ko-Fi page, and that seemed like the sort of thing almost guaranteed to attract unwelcome attention from Rockstar's lawyers. Sure enough, just a month after the mod launched, it's gone.

"The Bully Online project is shutting down. Thank you all for playing," a message posted on the website of YouTube and project lead Swegta (via Insider Gaming) now states. The Bully Online page on Swegta's website is already gone, as is the Mod DB page, although it can still be seen through the Internet Archive.

A more detailed message about the closure was posted today on Swegta's Discord server. "The Bully Online project is shutting down forever, which unfortunately means all the following is going to happen in 24 hours: our official Bully Online server (on swegta.com) will be shutdown, development of scripts for Bully Online will stop, the source code will be removed from swegta.com, all our webpages referring to it will be removed, the launcher downloads will taken down, and all Bully Online account data will be permanently deleted."

The dev team has thus far stayed mum on exactly why the mod was so suddenly deep-sixed, but said a forthcoming video from Swegta will get into the details. "For now though, know this was not something we wanted."

That said, I reckon we can figure out the broad strokes: The complete annihilation of the Bully Online mod, including removal of the source code and an all-but-explicit statement saying the team was forced into it, absolutely screams cease-and-desist letter, very likely of the heavy-handed sort. Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive had a reputation for that sort of thing back in the day, at one point reportedly sending private investigators around to modders' homes to, uh, talk to them about it.

Which isn't to say they have anything against mods in particular—in fact they seem quite enthusiastic about them, under the right circumstances. Rockstar bought the makers of the major FiveM and RedM mods in 2023, and have now launched its very own official mods shop.

A Scottish employment tribunal has denied a request for interim relief for Grand Theft Auto 6 developers fired by Rockstar in October 2025, saying they did not adequately demonstrate a likelihood that the final ruling on the matter will find that the former employees were fired because of their union membership or activities.

"The Glasgow Employment Tribunal has rejected the union's application for interim relief," a Rockstar spokesperson said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We welcome the decision, which is consistent with Rockstar's position throughout.

"We regret that we were put in a position where dismissals were necessary, but we stand by our course of action as supported by the outcome of this hearing."

Rockstar fired more than 30 GTA 6 developers in October 2025, initially accusing them of "gross misconduct" and then later alleging that they shared confidential information in a publicly-accessible Discord channel.

The Independent Workers of Great Britain union, however, claimed the employees were only speaking with labor organizers, and that the firings represented "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry." The IWGB initiated legal action against Rockstar in November 2025, after the union claimed Rockstar refused to "resolve the matter through negotiation."

Public opinion hasn't been on Rockstar's side: The IWGB has staged protests outside Rockstar offices, more than 200 Rockstar employees wrote in support of their fired colleagues, and even the UK government weighed in: Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine urged fellow Ministers to "support workers who have lost their jobs, and stop this from happening again," while Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it "a deeply concerning case" and promised ministers would look into it.

The denial of interim relief is a loss for the fired employees—one former Rockstar worker called it a "gut punch"—but only in a limited sense. The ruling notes that the IWGB Discord had roughly 350 members, more than half of whom were members of the IWGB itself, and that at least one had previously written "press articles about videogames," including at least about Rockstar itself. It also acknowledges that three of the fired employees were Canadian, and not members of the IWGB—and thus, "their trade union membership could not therefore have been a factor in their dismissal." That's all in line with Rockstar's prior allegations.

At the same time, however, the ruling also notes that the terminations came very quickly, with little or no notice, and without disciplinary hearings, suspensions, or an opportunity to respond to the allegations of wrongdoing. Some of the people fired had "posted very little" in the Discord, while others hadn't posted in more than a year, and "there was no evidence of [Rockstar] having suffered any adverse consequences as a result of these postings."

It also states that the bar for winning interim relief is higher than what will apply at the final hearing, "and reflects in part the consequences of an award of interim relief being made before the Tribunal has heard tested evidence." The ruling is an "interim decision," and the denial of relief at this stage "does not determine the final outcome of the case."

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, the IWGB said the decision "is disappointing but does nothing to dampen our hopes of winning justice when the full hearing takes place."

"We have always been clear that Interim Relief is an incredibly high bar to meet as a temporary measure before the substantive tribunal, and it would have been almost unprecedented for a Judge to award this to a group of this size," the IWGB said. "That we did not secure an interim relief order means the especially stringent conditions required for this kind of hearing were not met, but does nothing to suggest that Rockstar will not be found guilty of unfair dismissal when the case goes to trial."

WWE 2K24 is about to get the Gunther treatment, which is to say that 2K Games is going to mercilessly choke it out: As noted by Delisted Games, the Steam page for the rasslin' game that was released less than two years ago—on March 8, 2024—says it will be removed from sale on February 1, 2026, and will lose all online functionality on March 31. Offline modes will continue to function as normal.

That might seem like an awfully short window of existence for a major, mainstream videogame, but believe it or not the server shutdown date is actually an extension: WWE 2K24's online features were originally set to be killed on January 5. It's also a fairly standard period of full functionality for 2K's WWE games. WWE 2K23 servers took a piledriver in January 2025, 2K22 servers ate an RKO in '24, and four pre-2K21 games were put through tables at the same time in 2022.

Players can take some comfort in the fact that offline modes will continue to work as usual, so this isn't a Crew-like situation where the game will be rendered completely unplayable. It still sucks, though, because it's such an obvious, naked effort to push players to shell out for annual releases: If you're having fun playing online with your friends, you're going to have to keep paying for it.

And look, I know, it costs money to keep servers up and running, and at some point a game's player numbers just don't justify that ongoing expense. WWE 2K24 certainly seems to be at that point, with just 188 people playing on Steam right now—not exactly a vital and thriving audience. But that, I think, inevitably leads to another question: With all due respect to WWE fans who are happy to pay for a new game every year, but do we really need a new WWE game every year?

The answer, for now at least, is clearly "yes." And don't expect the pace of release-and-retirement to ease up anytime soon: 2K has already slated the end of service for the 2K25 edition for March 2027.

Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games fired more than 30 employees in October for reasons that still aren't entirely clear. Rockstar says the employees were leaking confidential information in a public forum, but the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain called it "plain and simple union busting." It was a big enough deal that the UK Parliament took notice, and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer has weighed in, calling the matter "deeply concerning."

The matter came up during today's Prime Minister's Questions, a weekly session in which the PM shows up to answer questions from Members of Parliament. Questions can come from both opposition and government MPs, which means it can sometimes be a bit performatively silly—such as in this instance, when MP Chris Murray, sitting with the government, recaps the Rockstar firings and asks Starmer if he agrees that all companies in the UK must abide by labour laws. Because of course they must! That's why they're called laws! What's Starmer going to do, say no?

(I bring this up mainly for the benefit of people who aren't familiar with the Westminster way and may thus wonder what exactly is going on here.)

"It's a deeply concerning case," the PM says in response to Murray's softball. "Every worker has the right to join a trade union, and we are determined to strengthen workers' and ensure they don't face unfair consequences for being part of a union. Ministers will look into the particular case that he raises and keep him updated."

It's bland and empty, as these sorts of responses tend to me, but it's significant to the extent that it commits the UK government to some kind of formal follow-up. Which is seemingly necessary, because it sure sounds like Rockstar is not inclined to be overly forthcoming about the matter, even with the government: In a statement provided to IGN, Murray said that a joint meeting with Rockstar that included fellow MPs Tracy Gilbert and Scott Arthur almost didn't happen because the trio refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Rockstar eventually withdrew the NDA demand, but it doesn't sound like things were overly productive from there. "The meeting only entrenched my concerns about the process Rockstar used to dismiss so many of their staff members," Murray said. "I was not assured their process paid robust attention to UK employment law, I was not convinced that this course of action was necessary, and alarmingly, I did not leave informed on exactly what these 31 people had done to warrant their immediate dismissal."

Along with whatever investigation into the matter the UK government pursues, Rockstar is also facing legal action filed by the IWGB.

When Microsoft laid off an astonishing 9,000 people in July, the long-awaited Perfect Dark reboot was among the casualties. The main studio working on it—The Initiative—was shuttered, but co-developers Crystal Dynamics tried to salvage the project by cutting a publishing deal with Take-Two. The deal never eventuated because Take-Two and Microsoft couldn't agree on who would retain ownership of the Perfect Dark franchise.

Nevertheless, it looks like Take-Two did get something out of those discussions: former The Initiative boss Darrell Gallagher and Perfect Dark director Brian Horton will found a new 2K Games studio. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier announced as much today, before Gallagher confirmed on LinkedIn.

"I'm excited to share that I will be joining 2K as SVP, Studio Head, where I'll be building a new studio and leading an ambitious opportunity unlike anything I've taken on before," he wrote. "I've spent my career believing in what's possible when great people come together with a bold vision. I can't wait to get started with the exceptional team at 2K!"

Gallagher founded The Initiative in 2018, and the studio's sole known project was the aborted Perfect Dark reboot. Before joining the Xbox Game Studios brood, he worked with Activision, Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics.

Brian Horton also confirmed the new 2K Games studio, albeit in fewer words, with the title of Vice-President Head of Creative. Horton has worked with a huge range of studios including Crystal Dynamics (dating before its collaboration with The Initiative) Insomniac Games, Infinity Ward and more.

While the new 2K Games project will almost certainly not be a Perfect Dark game, it'll be interesting to see if it ends up resembling one. If it does, that couldn't be a bad thing: Ted Litchfield absolutely loved what he saw of the reboot in 2024, making Microsoft's unceremonious cancellation all the more painful.

In light of July's catastrophic layoffs, Xbox boss Phil Spencer somehow mustered the courage to assert that Microsoft's gaming business has "never looked stronger".

An unlucky former Rockstar animator has made themselves the new temporary focus of Grand Theft Auto fans, after posting a demo reel of their work on various company titles to Vimeo. The two-minute reel includes finished scenes from the likes of GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, alongside various one-off animations with Pixar-style cartoon characters, but it's the opening 20 seconds that's attracting all the attention.

The three animations are flat-textured and set to Tom Petty's Love is a Long Road, the song featured in GTA 6's first trailer. The first shows a male character removing what seems to be the GTA 6 version of a Lime Bike from the rental rack, and then returning the bike to the same spot. Eagle-eyed fans had previously identified bike racks for some sort of rental company (which may well be called "Lombike"), so clearly this is another aspect of modern urban life that has found its way into the game.

The other two animations show a character, which does resemble protagonist Lucia, clambering down from a truck bed first of all, before the second animation shows her hopping down from the truck roof to the truck bed, and then out to the ground. There are also a few buildings in the background. I'm not sure what can be gleaned from that, other than that roof riding may well be more fleshed-out in this entry (I do have a dim memory of a mission in GTA 4 or 5 where I was hanging on to a roof).

Anyway: thoughts and prayers to the animator concerned, who's worked for Rockstar for over two decades on its biggest hits, and will hopefully not be given too much of a going-over by Take Two's friendly neighborhood lawyers. The footage was initially spotted and circulated via a Reddit thread, shortly after which the original was deleted (including a description confirming that the early footage is from GTA 6), though it's still easily findable.

It also should be said that this is work-in-progress portfolio stuff, and a long way from the kind of super-polished footage that Rockstar officially releases. Yes there's probably a few things to be gleaned about GTA 6 from it, but this all looks like very early footage, possibly even earlier than what we saw in the great GTA 6 leak of 2022.

As far as the official word, GTA 6 has so far had two blowout trailers, and two major delays. They're two of the best you'll ever see, to be fair: Here's 2023's trailer one, and here's the second we got to numb the pain of another delay. Right now the game is scheduled to release in November 2026: "These extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve" says Rockstar. At this stage I'll just settle for it being finished, because by the time GTA 7 rolls around I'm going to be in the nursing home.

I've been around long enough to remember a time when "PC gaming is dying" was something people said without irony: A declaration that the convenience and power of consoles would soon put an end to the headaches and expense of playing games on PC. It didn't work out that way, of course, and these days it seems like the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction: PC gaming is thriving, and the walled-garden approach of conventional consoles is increasingly being called into question.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick expressed just that feeling in a new interview with Squawk Box on CNBC. "I think it's moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed," Zelnick said. "But if you define console as the property, not the system, then the notion of a very rich game that you engage in for many hours that you play on a big screen—that's never going away."

Zelnick's qualifying comment hints at the state of flux the game industry currently finds itself in. Microsoft insists that it's making a new next-gen Xbox console, but it also wants us to know that everything is an Xbox now, which might lead one to wonder, as PC Gamer hardware hammer James Bentley did, what the point is of buying a new Xbox.

Valve, meanwhile, complicated matters even further with last week's announcement of the new Steam Machine, a small, connect-it-to-your-TV box that walks, swims, and quacks like a console, but is in reality a low-spec gaming PC. That reveal prompted Xbox boss Phil Spencer to remind us all, seemingly without much excitement behind it, that Xbox is "one of the largest publishers on Steam," and that doesn't seem great for Microsoft's console business: After all, if you can play Xbox games on your Steam machine, and you can't play Steam games on your Xbox console, why would you buy an Xbox console? Much of that decision will come down to pricing and we still don't have those numbers on the Steam Machine yet, but even at this stage it's something that people are no doubt thinking about.

So I find myself agreeing with Zelnick—console gaming is here to stay, even if consoles aren't—but I would be remiss if I didn't note the little irony: Grand Theft Auto 6, far and away the biggest gun in Take-Two's arsenal, still hasn't been announced for PC.

Rockstar employees may be "scared, hurt, and feel uncertain" following the sudden dismissal of more than 30 people last week, but they're not so frightened that they're unwilling to speak out. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain says more than 200 workers at the company have signed a letter to senior management demanding the reinstatement of their fired colleagues.

"It’s heartwarming to see so many of our colleagues supporting us and holding management to account," one of the fired employees said. "During a period where Rockstar want us to feel scared, my brave former colleagues are marching straight up to our boss’ door and demanding our voices are heard and not backing down.

"It’s clear to everyone close to this situation that this is a blatant, unapologetic act of vicious union busting. Rockstar employs so many talented game developers, all of whom are crucial to making the games we put out."

The employees, working at Rockstar offices in the UK and Canada, were fired abruptly at the end of October. Rockstar later alleged that the employees were "distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum," but the employees—and the IWGB—say they were fired for attempting to organize a union. The IWGB subsequently said efforts to negotiate the employees' return were rebuffed, leading it to file legal action earlier this week.

The UK Parliament has even taken notice, with Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine bringing up the firings. "Could I have a meeting with the relevant minister to discuss what steps could be taken to support the workforce?" she asked in Parliament today.

Video game giant Rockstar has sacked more than 30 workers across the UK, including my constituents working at their Edinburgh office. I urged Ministers to support workers who have lost their jobs, and stop this from happening again.

— @cajardinemp.bsky.social (@cajardinemp.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-13T21:11:13.364Z

Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive have remained steadfastly silent on the matter since making the leak allegations, but the pressure to rescind the terminations is growing. Former employees and IWGB members have held protests at Rockstar North and Take-Two offices in Edinburgh, and more are planned for London and Paris on November 14 and then Edinburgh again on November 18. French game industry union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo has also called on Rockstar to bring back the fired employees, and will be staging the protest at Take-Two's office in Paris.

The Independent Workers of Great Britain has launched legal action against Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games over what it says was an unfair termination of employees "that we believe amount to victimisation and collective dismissal linked to trade union activity."

The action was filed after Rockstar refused to meet and "resolve the matter through negotiation," the IWGB's legal team said in a statement. Instead, Rockstar has maintained the termination of the employees it fired last week in a manner the union described as "unacceptable and unlawful."

"Accordingly, we have now issued formal legal claims against Rockstar on behalf of the Claimants. Our members allege that Rockstar’s conduct constitutes trade union victimisation and blacklisting."

The dismissals in question occurred on October 31, when more than 30 Rockstar employees in the UK and Canada were fired without warning. The IWGB alleged at the time that the employees were fired because of their efforts to organize a union at Rockstar, calling it "the most brazen act of union busting the games industry has ever seen."

Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive denied the claim and said the employees were fired for "gross misconduct." Rockstar later clarified that allegation to say the employees were "distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum." The IWGB, however, said the only non-Rockstar people the employees were talking to were labor organizers.

"We are confident that what we’ve seen here is plain and simple union busting, and we will mount a full legal defence with our expert group of caseworkers, legal officers and barristers," IWGB president Alex Marshall said in today's announcement. "Employers like Rockstar would do well to understand that private spaces such as trade union Discord servers have protections, and that their company’s contractual clauses do not supersede UK law.

"This case stands as a warning to any employer in the games industry and beyond who thinks they are able to act with impunity against organised workers—we will not be intimidated."

Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive declined to comment on the legal action. Take-Two recently delayed the console release of Grand Theft Auto 6, from May 26 to November 19, 2026; a PC version remains unannounced.

The fallout from Rockstar's firing of over 30 employees last week continues as workers gather outside the offices in protest of what the Independent Workers' of Great Britain (IWGB) union alleges was a "brazen" act of union busting. YouTube channel People Make Games spoke with some of the developers and IWGB organizers about how they're fighting back against the Grand Theft Auto 6 developer and what happens next.

PMG originally intended to help publicize the Rockstar employee union this month but was informed about the sudden firing around the same time as Bloomberg's initial report went out. At the time, Rockstar parent company Take-Two said it fired the workers for "gross misconduct." And then, in a statement to Bloomberg last week, it said the workers were "distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum," and that the abrupt firing was "in no way related to people's right to join a union or engage in union activities."

The IWGB says that "public forum" was just a private Discord server where employees were speaking with labor organizers and that Rockstar's decision was "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry."

Since the firing, the former employees and union members have been protesting outside the offices of Rockstar North and Take-Two in Edinburgh holding signs and shouting through megaphones.

"The energy, the excitement, that spark that made this place so special is now shattered," a current Rockstar employee wrote in a letter read aloud by an IWGB organizer credited as Fred. "And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way right now. I know I'm not alone. And it's heartbreaking because right now, when we should be more united, and focused on the project than ever, most of us are scared, hurt, and feel uncertain."

Fred says that the goal is for all the workers to be reinstated with compensation to make up for the pay loss they experienced during the period, and for Rockstar to be accountable for "the way these dismissals have been handled, these very clear unfair dismissals without procedure, without evidence."

The IWGB has issued an appeal and is waiting for Rockstar's response. "What happens next is up to Rockstar," he said. "I have never seen a thing like this, not just in the game sector but in the UK trade union organizing in the last 20 years. This is the moment they can make that right. These are workers who just want to go back to work to work on the game that they love. If they don't [comply], they've seen what they have to contend with. The force of public feeling is against them on this. And we'll continue to put pressure on them through legal, through demonstrations, speaking about what these workers have experienced."

Neither Rockstar or Take-Two has made any additional comments about the situation. The last news to come from them was that GTA 6 will be delayed from its May 2026 date to November 2026. Take-Two said the extra time is needed to "finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve."

Fred tells PMG that he believes the cost of the firing, including the delays and any money Rockstar might end up having to pay out, will have been accounted for, but that he's confident things won't go Rockstar management's way.

"What they will never have accounted for, and something I've never seen management account for, is the bonds that people feel in their work, their willingness to stand up for each other and fight, the strength that's in a collective of people willing to put themselves at risk, willing to put their voices in the mix to stand behind them," he says. "And they don't account for that because they don't understand it. They've never seen it. We haven't seen it in the games industry. They've never seen it in their boardrooms, and they're about to find out what that means."

If you feel like we've been here before, then well done for being perceptive because we have. Rockstar announced yesterday that GTA 6 was getting delayed again, and is now scheduled for November 19, which seems like an eternity away.

As you can imagine, GTA 6 fans have been reacting really normally to this news. No, I'm serious, after the last delay, it seems like everyone went through all the stages of grief and has reached acceptance, or near enough: "Nothing wrong with delaying a game. Nothing at all. But why keep giving dates with so much confidence when they know it needs more time to polish?"

But among fans trying to rationalise another delay, there are others within the gaming industry sharing support, thinly-veiled threats, and even some theories about the breaking GTA 6 news.

"Interestingly, just a little industry knowledge for all you gamers, a Nov 19 launch puts them outside the nomination window for most game awards in 2026," Palworld's communications director, Bucky, says in a social media post. "Intentional or…? Either way, expect to see many games (especially AAA ones) swerve to avoid the 2027 awards season."

I'm not convinced that the delay has anything to do with falling outside the 2026 game awards schedule, although I wouldn't want to go up against Mewgenics in a fight. But the fact that GTA 6 will now likely fall into the 2027 awards window will likely cause more damage than good.

It was already clear that everyone wanted to keep clear of GTA 6's launch, well, all except for Devolver, but go off I guess. But GTA 6 won't just have a monopoly on people's time and wallets, but also the awards season. It's going to be like Baldur's Gate 3 all over again, god help our souls.

The fact that it'll likely be very hard for any other game to top GTA 6 during awards may well have factored into launch plans. So yeah, this delay has just widened the net of other games getting messed up by GTA 6, and it'll likely happen all over again when Rockstar finally gets around to releasing GTA 6 on PC, whenever that will be.

I didn't love Mafia: The Old Country. Where previous games in the series had compensated for their lows with some truly high highs, I felt like Hangar 13's more linear world and more traditional mob story reduced its Sicilian series entry to a uniform level of predictability and blandness, and said as much in our Mafia: The Old Country review.

But I still consider myself a fan of the Mafia series and, indeed, of Hangar 13 as a studio—it proved it can put out a game I love with Mafia 3 (and an idea I love with Rhapsody, its sadly canned post-Mafia-3 project), and I want to see more from both. So, regardless of my cold feelings toward the game, I'm glad to hear The Old Country did well enough to appease Strauss Zelnick, CEO of 2K's parent company, Take-Two.

Zelnick told The Game Business that Mafia: The Old Country's sales had surpassed Take-Two's internal expectations—though he didn't say what those expectations were—and that "What we suspected was confirmed." What did Zelnick and company suspect? "If you give consumers a great narrative experience that’s a lot of fun, somewhat contained, and at a fair price, then you can have the perfect result."

Which sounds to me like Take-Two is gonna get Hangar 13, and perhaps other studios under its control, to take a crack at doing the same thing again. Suits me.

While The Old Country didn't hit for me, I do think it's good for studios to focus on games that are smaller, tighter, more contained experiences. Not everything needs to be GTA 6 and, indeed, even GTA 6's attempts to be GTA 6 seem to be getting it into a spot of bother.

What I would like to see is bigger narrative swings. Hangar 13 has shown it can write stories and characters I really love with its games before—and I think a big part of my disappointment with The Old Country was how cliched a lot of its story elements felt. Perhaps now the big bosses have realised development at this scale can work, studios will feel more confident to try bolder stuff when it comes to the writing.

It's trotted out every time a game is delayed—that apocryphal Shigeru Miyamoto aphorism that a delayed game is eventually good, but a game you rush is bad forever. Miyamoto never said it but, hell, the truth is the truth. As frustrating as it can be to have something you're looking forward to punted back, we'd all rather a game be good and late than bad and on time.

Perhaps no studio has had this lesson drilled into it (kind of; its game didn't end up being 'bad forever') like CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk 2077 is, now, an excellent game—worthy of inclusion on our list of the top 100 games you can play right now, no less. At launch? Less so. Now, the studio has extended a little social media backing to Rockstar over yesterday's delay to Grand Theft Auto 6.

One of the many venues in which Rockstar announced GTA 6's delay to November next year was X (the everything app!). As you can imagine, the announcement attracted tens of thousands of replies ranging from disappointment to anger to jokes to expressions of support. One of the supportive replies was from the official Cyberpunk account, which said nothing except to quote one of its own tweets—from October 2020 (two months before CP2077's release)—declaring that "No more delays are happening."

Some onlookers mistook the tweet as CDPR casting shade at Rockstar—a declaration that, unlike the big dogs in Dundee, the RPG studio actually managed to release its game at some point.

It didn't take long for others to point out what CDPR really meant, though: "A lot of the comments are missing what they mean by this," wrote DoughboyBJ (always trust someone called DoughboyBJ), "CDPR pushed out a game that wasn’t ready and we all know how that launch went. They are basically saying 'trust the process, so we can play the best version of GTA 6.'"

Frankly, recent events surrounding Rockstar's firing of more than 30 employees involved in union organising—though Rockstar says the unionisation efforts had nothing to do with it—don't exactly incline me toward sympathy to its leadership right now, but I get why CDPR would see a chilling reflection of its own traumatic past in GTA 6. There was, perhaps, more hype for Cyberpunk 2077 than any other game I'd ever seen back in 2020.

Now? Well, there's more hype for GTA 6 than anything. If Rockstar doesn't get this right, its blunder will be penned in the history books for the rest of time, just like CDPR's was. No wonder it's keen to see the catastrophe avoided again.

Borderlands 4, by most accounts, seems to've landed well. A solid critical reception (including by yours truly in my Borderlands 4 review) and hefty playercounts seem to indicate Gearbox has once more put out another ol' reliable. Well, a somewhat reliable. More on that in a moment.

Its sales, which were reported to be very solid in the US, haven't quite panned out to the rest of the world. At least, if Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's to be believed in an interview with The Game Business. It's not all doom and gloom, though: "The critical acclaim [for Borderlands 4] was superb, and we’re really happy with the release.

"Equally, as you know, there were some challenges with the Steam release. Gearbox has been addressing those challenges and will continue to do so. So, in terms of units sold out of the gate, the numbers were a little softer than we would have liked. In the fullness of time, we think it’s going to do great."

That's only so surprising to hear. Despite the fact Borderlands 4 glued me to it for dozens of hours, I found myself wrestling with constant performance hitches and some truly atrocious UI design. Which, as Zelnick notes, Gearbox has been hard at work fixing. I already noticed improvements during my review period which was, admittedly, still post-launch due to Gearbox not sending us keys before launch.

Still, those problems caused it to hit a "mostly negative" score on Steam basically right out the gate. And because of how Steam reviews tend to work, that's a difficult thing to recover from; at the time of writing, BL4 is still "mixed" on Steam, and its recent English-speaking reviews are—huh, would you look at that. Cleanly split between 50% positive and negative. Right down the middle.

While Zelnick's confident the game will have a long tail, there have been other problems, as well. Gearbox's recent halloween event was a complete flub even for fellow Borderlands lover and guides writer Rory Norris, who was "left wondering what the point of it all even is." "It all" referring to the event, not existentially. Although maybe it really was that bad?

I don't think Zelnick's necessarily wrong, though, and it's not because my opinion of BL4's rickety frame is at-odds with the grumpy Steam public. Borderlands' model has always included a heaping helping of post-launch support; even Borderlands 3 enjoyed several substantial DLCs despite its rough critical reception, some of which were actually quite good.

Just anecdotally, games that have launch issues also tend to get most of their more hesitant players once discounts roll around. I've no doubt Borderlands 4 will truck merrily along for a few years, soft sales or no.