The quick take:
- Grand Theft Auto VI is set to launch November 19, 2026, 13 years after GTA V and after two delays.
- The last one made $1 billion in three days and has brought in more money than any movie ever made. It is still paying the bills, which is why its owner can afford to be late.
- Why it matters now: the most hyped product in entertainment launches November 19, and the reason its maker can afford the wait applies to any business with a product that keeps paying.
On September 17, 2013, a video game went on sale. Three days later, it had made $1 billion.
No movie, album or book had ever hit $1 billion that fast. Guinness World Records made it official.
By 2018, MarketWatch estimated the game had brought in more than $6 billion. For comparison, it put Star Wars and Gone With the Wind at about $4 billion each in inflation-adjusted box office.
The game was Grand Theft Auto V. By one running tally of Take-Two’s quarterly reports, the franchise has brought in about $10.2 billion since that launch.
It is still selling. Its sequel has been delayed twice. And the internet is losing its patience.
This is what everyone is waiting for:
Pick any post about anything online and scroll to the comments. Somebody has typed it.
“We got ___ before GTA 6.”
Fill in the blank with whatever just happened. The format is so common it has its own Know Your Meme entry, and one fan site calls it “the meme that became a unit of time.”
Kids who started kindergarten the fall GTA V came out are now old enough to buy the next one themselves.
Here is the part the comment section does not want to hear: the company making it is in no hurry. The old game is paying for the new one.
Wait, they have been building it for 13 years?
Not quite. Thirteen years is the gap since GTA V. Rockstar spent most of 2013 to 2018 on a different giant game, Red Dead Redemption 2.
Early work on GTA 6 started around 2015 with a research trip to Miami, but full development began after Red Dead 2 shipped in 2018. Call it about eight years of full production.
Over that stretch, Rockstar grew from about 2,400 employees in 2018 to over 4,700 developers across 12 studios, according to Bloomberg’s reporting.
So what is taking so long?
People. Not the ones building the game. The ones living in it.
Every pedestrian, shopkeeper and driver in the game is a non-player character, or NPC, that someone has to write, animate and program. When Rockstar’s leads ran the numbers on how many of those characters the new game needed, co-head of development Rob Nelson told Bloomberg: “The projections they were giving us were horrifying.”
Rockstar’s fix was to stand up an entire studio in Los Angeles devoted to building NPCs.
The other development co-head, Phil Hooker, summed up the tradeoff: “We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.”
Read that again.
Highly confident. Twice.
The original target was fall 2025. In May 2025 it moved to May 26, 2026. In November 2025 it moved again, to November 19, 2026, to reach “the level of polish players expected.”
After the second delay, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN, “I’m highly confident on the new date.” GamesRadar pointed out it was the same phrase he had used nearly a year earlier about the 2025 date.
Privately, he was less calm. When Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, brought him the second delay, she recalled his reaction: “You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.”
Once he heard the reasons, he came around and called it a “wise investment in time.”
Okay, but how is the business doing?
Better than the comments would suggest. In the quarter ended June 30, Take-Two reported:
- $1.39 billion in net bookings, slightly above its own guidance
- A $34.1 million net loss, which included a $43.4 million impairment charge
- 84% of bookings from recurrent consumer spending, meaning in-game purchases and add-ons
- Full-year guidance of $8.0 to $8.2 billion, with the November 19 launch doing most of the lifting
Meanwhile GTA V has sold 220 million copies.
Translation: a 13-year-old product is paying thousands of people to build its replacement.
“Couldn’t they just ship it and fix it later?”
They could. Plenty of companies do. Zelnick’s view: “When our competitors go to market before something was ready, bad things happen.”
And the waiting has not killed demand. The first trailer, released in December 2023, pulled about 90 million views in 24 hours. Every “before GTA 6” joke is a complaint, but it is also a reminder that millions of people are still waiting for the same thing.
Customers who are annoyed are still customers. The ones you need to worry about are the ones who stopped commenting.
How to apply this to your business
1. Build your GTA V first. Rockstar can afford eight years because an old product keeps paying. For a services firm, that might be retainers, maintenance contracts or a subscription tier. Recurring revenue is what buys you the time to do the big thing right.
2. Move the date once, and say why. The second delay cost Rockstar more credibility than the first, because “highly confident” had already been said. Customers forgive a late delivery with a clear reason faster than a confident promise that slips.
3. One big bet at a time. Rockstar mostly builds one flagship at a time with nearly the whole company behind it. Most small companies split their best people across five priorities and wonder why none of them ship.
4. Decide what “done” means before the deadline does. Hooker’s line works because the team knew what game they wanted to make. If you cannot describe your finished product in a sentence, the calendar will describe it for you.
Rockstar is betting the comment section goes quiet on November 19.
If the date slips again, the meme gets one more entry.
Before Your Next Meeting
- What is our GTA V? Which revenue would keep the lights on if our next big project ran a year late?
- When did we last ship something before it was ready, and what did it cost us in refunds, support time or reputation?
- Could we explain our last missed deadline to a client in one sentence?
- Who on our team is allowed to say, “We could hit that date, but it won’t be what we want to make”?
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