With GTA 6 officially revealed, now games can shift their focus to when the open-world epic will be released.
After years of working away in secrecy, renowned developer Rockstar Games finally pulled the curtain back on the sixth mainline entry into its vaunted sandbox gaming franchise known as Grand Theft Auto.
The debut trailer came after months of speculation, revealing a new main character for the series, the return to the beloved Vice City region, and stunning next-gen graphics never seen before in the series.
But one thing that was missing was an exact release date.
When Will GTA 6 Come Out?
Along with the new trailer for GTA 6 came the nebulous release year of 2025.
While no exact day or month was given with the title's 2025 release window, there are a few hints out there indicating when gamers can expect GTA 6 to hit store shelves.
GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive previously alluded to the highly-anticipated title coming at some point during fiscal year 2025.
Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick teased in a 2023 quarterly earning press release that "fiscal 2025" would serve as an inflection point for the company. He cited "several groundbreaking titles" coming to market that would result in "over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow," which likely includes GTA 6:
"Looking ahead, Fiscal 2025 is a highly anticipated year for our Company... For the last several years, we have been preparing our business to release an incredibly robust pipeline of projects that we believe will take our company to even greater levels of success. In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow. We expect to sustain this momentum by delivering even higher levels of operating results in Fiscal 2026 and beyond."
That would mean GTA 6 will likely be released sometime in Q1 2025, before the end of Take-Two's fiscal 2025 (which runs from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025).
The gaming giant already confirmed - thanks to a press release written as a part of GTA 6's trailer debut - that this 2025 release will just be for the console version of the game.
Take-Two listed "PlayStation 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X|S games and entertainment systems" as the only available launch platforms, meaning PC gamers will have to wait until a later date for the upcoming title.
GTA's Release Date Comes With Controversy
While it is exciting for GTA 6 to finally have been shown off in an official capacity (following widespread leaks and plenty of misinformation), some gamers are not too impressed by the game's 2025 release timing.
By the time GTA 6 was revealed, it had already been more than a decade since the last mainline title in the series hit store shelves. That means that if GTA 6 sticks to this 2025 release window, it will be nearly 12 years, making it the longest gap between Grand Theft Auto titles by a landslide.
Many had assumed - given the long development time between GTA 5 and 6 - 2024 would be the year of GTA 6. That is why it was so shocking to many that the title's announcement came with a 2025 date.
Within minutes of the trailer's debut, fans took to various online spheres to voice their disdain for the 2025 release window.
Gamers like Govermental53 on Reddit instantly wrote off the next twelve months, posting, "F*** 2024 I WANT TO LIVE IN 2025!"
Others (like Out of Context Humans on X) asked Rockstar what they have been doing for "10+ years:"
"Hurry the fuck up you’ve been making this for 10+ years."
What may have compounded this anger is the fact that so many gamers had also been expecting the title to come to PC day and date with its console counterparts.
Despite Rockstar traditionally separating console and PC releases of their titles, many were under the presumption the developer would opt to release everything simultaneously this time around, as large swaths of the gaming industry have done over the past few years.
So for those who were holding out hope for a PC release, this 2025 date likely means a mid-to-late 2026 release for their version of the game, as Rockstar usually takes 12-16 months to port their titles to the PC platform.
GTA 6 is currently slated to release sometime in 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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