Even though we still haven't seen a gameplay trailer, Grand Theft Auto 6's pre-release sales have been "unprecedented," according to publisher Take-Two. So why doesn't the public company just tell us specifically how many GTA 6 preorders it's sold?

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier recently posed that question to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who said that the volume of GTA 6 preorders is so unprecedented that they "can't tell whether they mean anything."

Specifically, Take-Two is unsure whether the preorder count can be used to accurately estimate GTA 6's total launch sales based on established wisdom, or if it's such an outlier that established wisdom doesn't apply, and people who'd normally wait to buy the game after launch are opting to preorder.

"The massive demand for preorders we've seen to date could reflect a pull forward of sales that otherwise would materialize in the fullness of time," Zelnick said.

Because they "simply don't know the demand curve because it's just never happened before," the CEO says that "the raw numbers could potentially be misleading," and as such Take-Two is keeping them to itself for now. (Though it is clearly happy to indicate that GTA 6 is already an extraordinary success.)

The next big moment for GTA 6 is a proper gameplay reveal, which will debut exclusively on Netflix on August 27, and then on Rockstar's public YouTube channel six hours later.

Regarding that controversial deal (I don't think it shows much respect for GTA fans myself), Zelnick told Bloomberg only that "there's reasoning" behind it and we'll "understand more" once we watch it.

All this talk of GTA 6 preorders is purely academic for the PC-only crowd, as there's still no PC release date for the game. The console-only launch is frustrating for PC gamers however you slice it, but it's made extra irritating by today's inflated console prices: The PlayStation 5 Pro currently goes for $900.

Grand Theft Auto 6's potential price-point was a thing of much consternation in the lead-up to its reveal. Months of rumours—and even the Bank of America getting involved in the discourse, because why not—led to the question: Are they really gonna charge $100 for this thing?

You're reading this article because they didn't, but you're also reading this article because they sort of did. See, GTA 6 has both an $80 version and a $100 version, the latter of which hides some potentially major parts of its identity behind the upgrade, including a handful of stores that may very well remind you that you've not shelled out every time you go near them.

There's this itchy capitalist feeling that Rockstar probably did actually want to charge a hundo for the thing, but didn't, because that'd have gamers up in arms—as it turns out, that might've been the smart play. In a recent interview with CNBC, Take-Two interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick says:

"It's skewing more to the premium edition, but that might be a reflection of the fact that the most avid consumers are the ones that are pre-ordering now," Zelnick says, before adding that they're unlikely to lower the game's price point themselves, even if retailers might want to reduce their own margin to draw in customers:

"We preserved our pricing on Grand Theft Auto 5 for a very long time—much longer than a standard release of an entertainment property."

Now sure—as Zelnick says, this is a case of sample size. I'd be very surprised if, writ large, most people had $100 in their pocket to shell out for a video game, even one as glitzy and prestigious as GTA 6. I reckon he's on the money (pun intended) about more excited gamers being more likely to both pre-order and spend the extra dough.

But it very much feels like GTA 6 is, in combination with the content locked off behind that paywall, basically $100. And if what Zelnick says is true—that those sales are split down the middle with a lean towards $100—then Take-Two has effectively gotten away with charging $90 for the game's pre-order when every last bead on the abacus is set into place.

And man, my feelings are mixed. Yes, $100 is a lot of money to spend on an entertainment product in the, uh, interesting financial times we live in. But there is the elephant in the room that the production of big-budget games like GTA 6 has absolutely outstripped inflation. Would I pay $100 for a videogame? No, even on principle. But given it took literal, actual billions to make, $100 is technically low-balling it.

You have to wonder if GTA 6 might even be part of an endangered species, now. Sure, we'll get other Grand Theft Auto games assuming we're all still around in 10+ years, but can an industry that's so hungry to chase quarterly results at the exchange of all else sustain anything else of that game's scale and budget? Probably not, but hey—maybe things'll get healthier and less layoff-happy in a decade. One can hope.

You won't win any prizes for guessing that Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold well since its initial 2013 release, several lifetimes ago, but on a recent Take-Two earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed the up-to-date, astronomical figure: 230 million copies.

"The Grand Theft Auto series once again exceeded expectations, and to date, Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 230 million units worldwide," Zelnick told investors on the August 7 call. "Recurrent consumer spending for the series grew 3% and GTA Plus continues to thrive. All led by a series of content offerings, including the addition of the Rockstar Mission Creator, an all-new suite of innovative and in-depth tools, empowering the player community to bring missions to life.

"Global excitement for the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 continues to build, with the title having an exceptional start to pre-orders. With Rockstar Games' recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto 6 and extended look on August 27, we believe the consumers' passion and anticipation for the next evolution of this iconic series will grow further, leading up to the title's November 19 release."

230 million is obviously a lot of copies, but it has a vague "number big" quality without added context. I'll endeavor to provide some in the form of funny statistics and back of the napkin math to drive it home:

• That's over 10 times the estimated lifetime sales of Baldur's Gate 3 (20 million), and 5 times that of Cyberpunk 2077 (40 million).
• GTA5 has sold an average of 17.7 million copies per year, a number uncomfortably close to the 25 million lifetime sales achieved by the bottom entries of Wikipedia's list of the top 50 best-selling games of all time (GTA 5 is third on that list).
• Breaking that down further, GTA 5's average sales of 1.5 million copies per month as a lifetime figure would make for a double-A development success story or indie royalty.
• It's about two thirds the population of the United States, and almost four times that of the United Kingdom.
• Still nowhere near Tetris (estimated 520 million) or Minecraft (est. 400 million).

Number indeed big. It gives you a sense of just what Take-Two is hoping to accomplish with GTA 6 and its estimated multi-billion dollar development budget. Rockstar's upcoming game is an entertainment juggernaut that has every other developer reassessing their fall release schedule, but it also has massive shoes to fill as far as the hungry hungry shareholders are concerned.

Let's be real, come August 27, the Grand Theft Auto 6 "extended look" is not going to be exclusive to Netflix for six hours as advertised. It's going to be exclusive to Netflix for however long it takes for someone to record it and distribute a torrent.

You wouldn't download a car, but would you download an ad for a game about stealing cars?

It would be, I've now had to consider, technically piracy to do so. After all, Netflix probably paid good money for the privilege of being the first to show the world GTA 6 gameplay, although we can only guess, because the financial terms of the deal haven't been disclosed.

Aside from whatever funds exchanged hands, GTA publisher Take-Two's motivation for the deal is to signal that GTA 6 is a cultural event that transcends the gaming scene. And Netflix gets to be associated with that cultural event.

I get Netflix's angle. I don't get Take-Two's, unless the payday was astronomical. Everyone already knows GTA is a big deal, and it's plain disrespectful to GTA fans to turn the gameplay trailer they've been waiting for into a money-making opportunity, especially given that many of them have already pre-ordered the game.

Having to wait six hours to watch a trailer is a relatively minor inconvenience, all things considered, but monetizing a trailer is just tacky. It certainly doesn't reinforce Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's claim that GTA 6 is an "incredible bargain" at $80-$100. It suggests, instead, that we should brace for maximum nickel-and-diming and FOMO exploitation.

I suppose this is how it goes when you don't have to worry about your reputation. There's not much Take-Two and Rockstar could do to hurt GTA 6's sales at this point: They've already sold a zillion pre-orders (or something like that) without any gameplay trailer at all. If there is a line that can't be crossed, it's a couple celestial bodies removed from a tacky gameplay reveal or a new labor scandal.

When the GTA 6 extended look debuts on Netflix on August 27, we'll watch it and report on its contents here, but I imagine a quick scan of social media will allow you to illicitly experience the marketing beat early, if you're the sort of outlaw who dares to watch pirated videogame trailers.

After letting the speculation machine run wild for months, Take-Two announced in June that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch with an $80 price tag for the basic, missing-some-stuff edition. That's a lot of money, especially when you consider that most people will feel compelled to lay out the extra $20 for the Ultimate Edition, which promises "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." But Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reckons it's actually a heck of a deal for what you're getting.

Asked about the $80 price point for GTA 6—and the decision to leave NBA 2K27 at $70—during today's investors call, Zelnick repeated a point he's made previously: That Take-Two aims to "deliver way more value to consumers than what we charge them."

"The real cost of a triple-A videogame is a whole lot lower today than it was 20 years ago. Pricing has not kept pace with inflation," Zelnick said. "And our goal is to continue to overdeliver for our consumers because how you feel about any experience is the intersection of the experience itself and what you paid for it.

"To say that we expect that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be an incredible bargain as experiences go is a gross understatement, because Rockstar Games is known for overdelivering."

Not every game is Grand Theft Auto 6, a point made earlier this year by Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky, who warned that if Take-Two didn't increase the GTA 6 price, the industry as a whole would probably be stuck at the $70 price point for years to come. So while GTA 6 will launch at the increased price point, Zelnick said not all Take Two's games will.

"Our goal is not to maximize price," Zelnick said. "So in this case, I think what we’ve decided to do makes a whole lot of sense in the context of what we’re delivering, and that’s the lens through which we’ll look going forward as well."

Grand Theft Auto 6 remains scheduled for release, on consoles, on November 19. We'll get our first look at gameplay on August 27, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on Netflix, and then six hours later on YouTube.

During Take-Two's latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that's making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia's QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, "not a good thing."

But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the pastime, Zelnick said Take-Two doesn't see increasingly inaccessible gaming hardware as an insurmountable problem. In part, that's because Rockstar's parent company expects a lot more of us will be streaming games in the near future.

The "advent of streaming," Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is "right around the corner, in terms of having something that's low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren't game machines before will become game machines."

As a result, the company imagines its customer base will continue to grow as cloud gaming becomes standardized, regardless of what happens to the traditional gaming hardware market.

That's "if you believe in streaming," Zelnick said, "and to be clear, we really do. And I'm happy to put a timeline on it. I think we'll be in commercial streaming mode within three years."

By Zelnick's estimate, broader adoption of cloud gaming could effectively increase Take-Two's potential user base tenfold. That wouldn't necessarily produce a tenfold increase in revenue, he said, as the company's most "avid" customers are those who already have traditional gaming hardware. But game streaming "creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable, even outside of core markets."

Some amount of Zelnick's vision of a glorious and lucrative game streaming future is believable: It's easy to imagine that there's a number of people out there who might, for instance, be interested in playing Take-Two games like GTA 6 even if they aren't otherwise compelled to invest in a gaming setup—especially as the cost of building one continues to rise.

But for streaming to become a more common standard in gaming, it'll need to overcome profound—and intensifying—anxieties about game and media ownership. From the Stop Killing Games effort to the outcry provoked by Sony's announcing an end of disc production, there's a justifiable unease among consumers about being left with no way to access games outside of streaming and subscription services that can be shuttered as soon as they stop generating the requisite revenue figures.

Even Hideo Kojima's in his feelings about it, recently sharing his fears that "we will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved." While Zelnick was bullish about digital media distribution elsewhere in this week's earnings call, it's worth noting that he previously went on record in 2020 as being "highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed."

In time, however, we might validate the prediction of Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay, who said in 2024 that gamers would get "comfortable with not owning your game." If the hardware cost crisis continues to worsen, we might not have a choice.

Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick has waded into the discs vs. digital debate, and given the company's decision to release Grand Theft Auto 6 exclusively in digital format, you probably won't be surprised to find that he thinks discs "don't really make sense" these days.

PC gamers have lived in an almost fully digital world for years, thanks primarily to the rise of Steam, but it's different on the console side of things, where physical game releases, and retailers like GameStop, are still a regular part of life. But two things have shaken that foundation recently: The lack of a physical edition of GTA 6—a game so big it really does have the potential for that kind of industry-wide impact—and Sony's decision to end disc production in 2028.

That's got some console gamers a little shook, but Zelnick doesn't think it's going to matter much because the digital revolution has mostly already happened anyway. "Our business is well over 90% digitally distributed as it is. It’s already a digital business," he said in today's earnings call. "So in certain instances, especially if it’s a big game, discs—and note I said discs—don’t really make sense for the consumer.

"Also, most instances you have to register online to play anyhow. So if you’re already connected, who cares if you download digitally? It’s all the same and it’s much more convenient."

Zelnick is correct, mostly, that digital distribution is more convenient, as long as you have access to the necessary online infrastructure—which is to say, internet that doesn't suck. Certainly the world is better on that front than it was 20 years ago, but there are just as certainly still people for whom downloading tens or hundreds of gigabytes is absolutely not convenient.

Beyond that, there's also the ineffable magic of game boxes, and the way they make games "real" in ways that downloading from Steam or GOG simply cannot duplicate. Some of us just love those big dumb game boxes that eat up so much space on shelves, and a not-insignificant sense of the excitement around gaming is lost when everything is reduced to an intangible clot of data.

All of that is without getting into the whole question of "ownership," and I'm sorry to say it but for as mad as we all got at that guy from Ubisoft who said we need to get comfortable with the idea of not owning our games, he was right.

Anyway, none of that represents the mainstream gaming audience, and there's no uncrossing this particular Rubicon. But Zelnick said the embrace of digital doesn't mean Take-Two is abandoning physical releases completely: Comparing it to the persistence of vinyl in the music business, he said that Take-Two will likely put out physical editions of games "now and then." But, he continued, "in other instances, it just won't make sense."

Zelnick isn't the only one in the industry who thinks the move away from game discs on consoles won't ultimately be a big deal. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in July that "there are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much," while industry analyst Daniel Ahmad more directly echoed Zelnick's point, saying "the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point" anyway.

Grand Theft Auto 6, for the record, remains set for release on November 19, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. A PC version still hasn't been announced.

After years of speculation, after reams of fan theories and screenshot analysis, we'll be finally getting a full look at Grand Theft Auto 6 on… hold on, Netflix? Really? Right, okay, sure.

This news comes courtesy of the site itself, which has a preview page that reads: "Coming August 27: See an extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6, the next evolution in the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto series." It's given the tags of "crime films" and "action adventure films". Which is technically true for a documentary about Grand Theft Auto 6, I guess—but very much not true of the game itself. Because it's a videogame, and not a film.

The first look will nonetheless be debuting, as mentioned above, on August 27 at 3 pm EST/8 pm BST. It'll also be coming to YouTube, but six hours later, meaning Netflix has swung a six-hour exclusivity deal with Rockstar for the purposes of, I assume, getting people to pay for Netflix subscriptions.

And hey, from a business perspective? Bully for Netflix, good for them! This is sure to get at least a little pocket change in the coffers of a subscription service that's grown a little less popular thanks to all the advertisements and, er, AI advertisements.

These kinds of deals will almost certainly work slightly better than Netflix's other attempts to get a slice of the videogame pie, given it took one of its games down after just half a year and closed its AAA development studio in 2024 in order to make AI games with a new head of operations, who, er, exited around four months later.

Basically, offering exclusive streaming options to key-jangle people into paying for a month of Netflix subscription seems like an altogether more sensible proposition than an Amazon-esque hubris, believing you can do videogames just because you do movies and TV good and have a lot of money to throw around.

And, hey—if you're excited about GTA 6, you'll finally get to see it! Yipee! You just might have to take a six-hour nap unless you've got a few bucks in your pocket, or if you happen to already have an active subscription going.

Take-Two Interactive, publisher of Grand Theft Auto 6, will hold its Q1 FY2027 results call on Friday, August 7, and I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-excited but I think something might be happening. Allow me to explain.

Part of my job involves listening in to quarterly investor calls, in case anything interesting is revealed about current or upcoming projects—you never know when a CEO is going to accidentally leak a release target or confirm The Witcher 4. So naturally, it behooves me to know when these calls are happening.

US-based publishers generally hold their calls late in the afternoon in the Eastern time zone, typically 4 or 4:30 pm, and Take-Two is no exception: Results drop at 4, get on the phone at 4:30, and that's your day done. But this upcoming investors call is scheduled for 8 am ET—that's 8.5 hours earlier this T2's usual call time.

The obvious question is, why? Take-Two head of global corporate communications Alan Lewis tells me it's "just scheduling." It may well be "just scheduling," but with the biggest videogame in years now just a few months away from its scheduled release—Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch, for consoles, on November 19—oddities like this naturally draw extra scrutiny.

Of course, if there is a big secret GTA 6 announcement inbound, Take-Two wouldn't tell me about it, but I persevere nonetheless. So in the event that we are in for GTA news, I see two possibilities.

One, a delay: GTA 6 marketing was meant to kick into gear this summer, but here we are in August—just three months from launch—and we've had nary a peep. Weird, right? This week's investors call is the last with any meaningful space between it and GTA 6 day, so if Take-Two is hitting the brakes and wants to mollify investors with an urgency, this is the time to do it.

Possibility two: Early August is mid-summer, which means we're still well within that promised marketing window. Rolling into an investors call with the biggest game trailer to come along in years would be a baller move, and set the company up to absolutely bulldoze the holiday quarter. Which it's going to do anyway, assuming taht first possibility isn't correct, but sometimes it's fun to let 'em know you're coming.

Neither of those theories explain why Take-Two is holding its investors call at 8 am, but consider this: I dug through T2's quarterly earnings calendar all the way back to the start of 2020, and do you know how often it's held investor calls on a Friday? Never! So there you go, right?

For the record, I think a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drop is far more likely than a delay, but a last-minute postponement doesn't strike me as beyond the realm of possibility either. Yes, there's also the chance that this is indeed "just scheduling," I suppose, but that's not very exciting—nor does it answer the underlying question of why?

Whatever the reason, we'll be watching, and we'll let you know what happens when—if—it happens.

Every few years or so I find myself idly wondering whatever happened to Midnight Club, Rockstar's arcade street racing series. I quite liked Midnight Club 2 back in the day, although I fell away from the series after that because, in fine Rockstar fashion, subsequent games weren't released on PC. The series as a whole ground to a halt in 2008 with Midnight Club: Los Angeles—despite going over well with critics, the series was never heard from again.

In a new interview with Kiwi Talkz on Insider Gaming, former Rockstar designer Kris Roberts, who worked on multiple Midnight Club games and Red Dead Redemption before leaving in 2010, said there were a few factors involved in the decision to kill the series, including missed deadlines and "non-trivial conflict" between Rockstar New York and the San Diego studio where Midnight Club was developed, but the obvious elephant in the room was Grand Theft Auto.

"The perception was we never got the accolades or the reception," Roberts said. "The New York perspective was, 'You’re not GTA.' When you’re the red-headed stepchild project—you know, we’re doing a good job, we’re world-class, but we’re still treated less than. It was challenging."

Roberts said the San Diego studio was working on a new Midnight Club when he departed, but it was subsequently cancelled: "It was pretty clear that there would be no more Midnight Club and everything was going to be GTA and stuff moving forward, and that’s just the way it was going to be."

Which sucks, because Midnight Club was pretty great (apart from the whole console-exclusivity thing), but also isn't at all hard to believe. Midnight Club: LA arrived in 2008, the same year Grand Theft Auto 4 came out, and if there was any doubt prior to that about where Rockstar's future lay, GTA 4 ended it.

The ending of Midnight Club also fits with the broader approach of Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive, which makes no bones about only being interested in major hits: When the company unloaded Private Division in 2024, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said, "Our job really is to focus on making the biggest and best hits in the marketplace. We're not the long tail company. We are top-ten hit makers around here." In an environment like that, being "good" often just isn't going to be good enough.

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents' laptop as a young'un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive.

The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at the contemporary world, where game boxes come with mere codes inside and PlayStation is killing off disc production. That last factoid has triggered commentary all over the industry and beyond, with everyone from Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot and French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon weighing in.

Speaking to IGN, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser gave his own commentary on the physical vs. digital debate with a multifaceted answer. "I don't know that I care. If people want that, I think companies should provide it," he said.

"But I don't know that I personally care. And I also think the ability to update games, as critical as people are of digital releases, the ability to update and fix problems in games has been really useful for the quality of games." Notably, both physical and downloadable patches existed before digital distribution became the rule. Magazines like the superlative PC Gamer would even help distribute them!

Grand Theft Auto writer Jeffrey Crawford "Lazlow" Jones, who was with Houser for the interview, weighed in as well. "I mean, we all have that sort of feeling of when you get that copy and you put the disc on the console, but I also have to say, I really like being at the airport and going, 'oh cool, I can download some quick games to my Steam Deck for this 12-hour flight."

Jones went on to talk about how tangibility still has its perks even as a creator: "[It's] just really fulfilling to have a physical thing you can say, 'Look, we made a thing.'" Houser followed up, "I love physical media. I think everyone does, you know." It's worth noting that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be both a digital-only game and console-exclusive at launch.

We're in the endgame now for Grand Theft Auto 6, and with just 139 days to go players are beginning to scrimp and save for its anticipated release—if they haven't pre-ordered the standard or controversial ultimate edition already. We've seen some resourceful players utilise Bing and Microsoft Rewards to get an impressive discount, but that's not the only way you can get some dollars off the price.

Another fortunate gamer managed to save $77.87 for their pre-order, cutting the price of GTA 6's standard edition from $79.99 down to just $2.12, all thanks to cash back on Best Buy.

"Upgraded to the PS5 Pro a few months ago just to make sure my setup was ready for launch," tangyredapple explains. "Totally forgot I used my Best Buy card for the console and racked up a ton of cash back from it.

"I checked my account today when the pre-orders went live, stacked my reward certificates with a 10% off coupon, and walked away paying less than three bucks for the game. Just a heads up to check your Best Buy reward points or other cash back! If you bought a console recently to prep for the game, you might basically have this paid for already. See y'all in Vice City."

For those who are curious as to why they didn't splurge out the extra $20 for the ultimate edition, physical pre-orders (sans the disc, rip) are only available for the standard edition. But you can subsequently pay for the upgrade after the fact.

These kinds of money saving tricks may sound fairly obvious, but it clearly pays to pay attention and check out discounts wherever possible. GTA 6 isn't as expensive as I thought it would be, although that's a low bar, but it's still a hefty price if you want to be able to access all the content there is. So my advice would be to check out Microsoft Rewards, use Bing (I know, I'm sorry), and keep an eye out for any other way you could get some money off, every little helps.

Rockstar's a big company—and while we're excited for Grand Theft Auto 6, that doesn't sideline the studio's potential for cruddiness. Both from a consumer-facing point of view (like GTA 6 being fully digital) or an employee-facing one, with union-busting allegations in the UK still ongoing.

It looks like, even outside of that dispute, there are still problems. Union members who aren't embroiled in the current legal quagmire spoke to GameDeveloper about their experience with the studio, and it's not looking particularly solid there, either.

The developers, which the report states "chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal"—already a bad sign—go into a trio of problems with the company that's making things difficult. Namely bonuses, gender pay gaps, and crunch.

Firstly, that the lack of transparency around those bonuses makes it a useful carrot on the stick for leadership—and a mental nightmare of invisible chess for employees, given they've got no idea whether their bonuses will be good or not, or what even goes into one:

"The reasoning given for this is often nebulous," GameDeveloper is told, "Inconsistent between departments, even inconsistent between team members within the same department, and sometimes hinges on completely subjective or retroactive criticisms.

"They are under no obligation to show their working. Employees want good pay, and if literally anything they do that year could affect it, they will naturally feel they have to be as pliable as possible to their boss's whims."

The report also states that initiatives to address gender pay gaps were scrapped, and that night workers were no longer given extra compensation for their hours. It doesn't help that there's still reportedly an attempt to normalise crunch within the company.

In the UK, labour laws have a baked-in maximum working time of 48 hours a week unless workers opt-out. These employees claim that not only had Rockstar baked in that opting-out into their contracts, but that the steps towards opting back into the regulations (which every employee has a right to do) were obfuscated by the company, requiring a union campaign to inform them they had the choice.

"The union successfully ran a campaign to inform people they could opt back in to the regulations at any time, which resulted in Rockstar management simplifying the process and removing the obligation to meet with HR.

"Part of the problem with crunch is that there is not an agreed definition, and now it seems the company thinks that offering specific and limited compensation as an incentive for overtime means it no longer qualifies as crunch."

The employees claim, also, that this crunch is applied inconsistently across teams, with some who "seem to never get out of it—and often colleagues do not realize the opposite group exists".

Take-Two's response to GameDeveloper's request for comment is mostly boilerplate corporate stuff, but it's only fair I include it here, too: "We strive to make the best games possible by giving our talented teams world-class work environments and ongoing career opportunities. We have fostered a culture which is focused on teamwork, excellence, and kindness, and where we support and reward the team across all levels of the business through competitive compensation and benefits policies.

"We are proud that as a result, our employee retention is well above the industry standard. We have received a request from a union seeking to discuss voluntary recognition. We value an open and constructive dialogue with all stakeholders and will arrange to meet."

And hey, at least Take-Two's meeting with them—a low bar, but it's at least being crawled over. It might be that Rockstar's deciding not to get in hot water again while it's still legally tangled in another union-busting accusation.

It feels like the whole world is on tenterhooks for the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, if not because they are excited for a videogame then because it feels like Rockstar is propping up that part of the global economy not propped up by AI. But I'll tell you one guy who isn't going to play: Vitaly Milonov, a deputy of Russia's Duma from the United Russia party, who recently lambasted the game for carrying "the stench of Americanism."

In a recent chat with Russian radio station Govorit Moskva, Milonov gave Rockstar a piece of his mind: "GTA, from its very first version, has been about violence and hooliganism," Milonov told the station. "The last version doesn't differ at all from those before it, in terms of deviance."

What does he mean by "deviance"? Well, a little about Milonov: a member of Russia's ruling party, Milonov has long made a name for himself as a blowhard campaigner against gay rights and 'non-traditional values' in Russian society. He has, in the course of his career, spearheaded laws banning "gay propaganda," lost the plot over gay Finnish stamps, slung anti-semitic insults at Jewish political opponents, and called LGBT rights activists "non-human". He is deputy chairman for the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children.

But despite his lifelong commitment to persecuting innocent people, Milonov actually doesn't seem worried that the GTA 6 hype will end up converting innocent Russians to lifestyles he disapproves of.

"I do not think that the game can strongly persuade anyone to adopt such a lifestyle," he continued, "if only because a normal person understands that it's about the world of the USA. There—violence, sex and drugs really reign. You immerse yourself in the stench of Americanism when you play GTA."

Milonov actually seems to welcome the regular ultraviolence of GTA's world, given that it only impacts Americans. "Any violence in GTA is violence against a potential enemy, so if they all tear each other apart—even just in GTA—it will only be for the better."

Rockstar's probably not going to put that on the back of the box.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.