GTA 6 reportedly still "not content complete," and Rockstar could delay it again as it strives for "perfection"

I don't know if my delicate little soul could take another GTA 6 delay. First, it was meant to be arriving in 2025. Then it was pushed to May 2026. Now, the GTA 6 release date is destined for November 19 this year. Barring some major fumbles and oversights on Rockstar's part, it will surely be one of the best open-world games ever made, and seeing it pushed even further into the future would be a hard pill to swallow - for me, it's less about a rampant desire for more Grand Theft Auto, and more about simply seeing whether the most anticipated videogame in history lives up to expectations. While November seems like an achievable goal, it still doesn't really feel guaranteed that GTA 6 will arrive then, and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has sewn more seeds of doubt in my mind. Although he admits the current release date is way more "solid" and attainable than previous ones, he believes that GTA 6 is "still not content complete."

I think we've all come to learn by now that just because Rockstar (and parent company Take-Two) expresses confidence in a date doesn't mean it'll actually be achieved. But Schreier's comments on the latest episode of the Button Mash podcast have deflated me a little. It's not all doom and gloom - there's still a decent chance GTA 6 will hit its current target and won't suffer another delay. But hearing this, I wouldn't be surprised if it got pushed back yet again.

"This is a big and complicated game and the last I heard it was still not content complete," Schreier says. "That is to say that people were still finishing things up, still finalizing levels and missions and seeing what's going to make it into the game. Typically the way that game development works, you have your feature complete, your content complete, your bug testing phases, and there's a lot of boundaries blurred along the way in all of those different stages. But they [Rockstar] are still still making stuff."

Schreier is hopeful that things will be firmly in the bug fixing stage "soon," but admits that "it's really hard to say" what the current status is and that even if it does go into that final phase of polishing, "there's always someone who wants to sneak in some last minute stuff."

"I don't think anyone in Rockstar could tell you with 100% certainty that they will make it out in November," he states.

Schreier also explains how there is some "breathing room" for GTA 6 to suffer a short delay that wouldn't result in too big a financial impact for Take-Two.

"With a game like this, the stakes are so high," he says. "They really can't settle for anything less than perfection with this release because there's so much riding on it. The entire stock of Take-Two lives or dies on this game. Every time this game slips, their shares drop 10%, I should say. So yeah, it's not something that they will release in any sort of compromised state.

"So if it comes to like October and [they feel that] the game is not 100% ready, I suspect they would rather [let the date] slip than release it. And then one more thing I'll say is that their fiscal year […] ends at the end of March [2027]. So they do have a little bit of [a] buffer. Obviously they would want to be out for the holiday season and Black Friday and all the beautiful Christmas sales that they always do. But I think they have a little bit of buffer to next March if they still want to release the game."

So, if you were confident that November 19 would finally be the day you'd get your hands on GTA 6, I'd maybe temper expectations. Even if it got a small nudge back to early 2027, before the new financial year, I still wouldn't even put all your hopes behind that new date either. GTA 6 is the epitome of the phrase 'it's ready when it's ready,' and as Schreier rightly states, the stakes are super high. While it'll no doubt generate a billion dollars in its first week as folks flood to buy it, anything short of perfection could rule it out of being a long-term money maker like GTA 5 has been.