Rumors: GTA 6 has been delayed until early/mid 2026

Really is insane how long modern game development takes. Rockstar I'll give a bit of a pass as they produce some of the most iconic games that also can last a decade.

But all the other studios pumping out pure shite like Concord, Star Wars Outlaws, Forspoken would really benefit from an honest look at what the frick they're doing.

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They have to be at least a little worried about recent trends. Reportedly, they've turned up the #Woke on VI. Realistically, I still think they have a relatively bulletproof product, but they're spending 10 figures on this game, so the margin of error is smaller than one might think.

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I think it’s more that they want to keep milking GTAV online. They pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year on that. Why put out something new, potentially fragmenting your player base and killing the golden goose, unless absolutely necessary? Frankly, I think they’ll continue pushing it back until they feel like they need to release it, either because online is slumping or the game will get too dated if they hold any longer.

Probably a big part of it, too.

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They have to be at least a little worried about recent trends. Reportedly, they've turned up the #Woke on VI.

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This was all but admitted when the Howsers departed. The amount of content that’s been removed from GTA V in the past couple years due to the complaints about “punching down,” are telegraphing the tone of the next release.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the ongoing delays aren’t development related. But due to poor focus group scores and a hope the current environment passes.

If the game released today, I think the online mode would fail. They effectively moderated RDR2 into extinction. The same group that thought naming a horse Sarah Jessica Parker was so offensive it needed to be banned is about to moderate a series whose entertainment is solely derived from a group of people yearning for the title of biggest jackass in the lobby.

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There's way too much focus on shite that ultimately doesn't matter IMO. Make video games just games again.

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I really wonder if video games companies are suffering from the same problem tech companies had where they had massive stables of developers, many of which were producing absolutely nothing, but leadership was slow to clean up because people didn't really understand their work enough to know.

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The studios have openly stated they want live services games with 5+ year lifespans.

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Well, I understand WHY the studios are pushing these supposed long lived, live service games. Modern games are extremely expensive to make. The best outcome is clearly to build a single game that stays popular for a really long time and then just support it.

Problem is, studio executives are desperately trying to wishcast fantasies of being the next Fortnite into reality.

Live service games compete with each other for a fixed # of players, hours, and dollars. Once you miss the boat, you've missed it. Players are invested into their chosen games already and aren't gonna switch to yours.

This mountain of failed live service games reminds me exactly of the pile of failed WoW clones that plagued the industry in the late 2000's early 2010's.

They saw a game WoW that was making insane profits and just said "Hey, let's do that too!" without any regard for why what they were trying to do was basically impossible. Many of those MMORPG's were actually quite good and they still failed.

The problem is this swing for the fences mentality. It's not enough to make mid-budget games that turn a nice profit if they sell 3 million copies.

Instead they convince themselves they are going to build the next billion dollar bonanza (WoW, GTA5, Fortnite, Overwatch, etc.) and use that to justify sinking untold resources into their almost sure to fail project.

In GTA6's case, the game will probably be a big hit just on name-brand alone, but in general the industry needs to stop swinging for the fences so much. When you roll the dice on "billion dollar franchise" vs. "colossal failure" you're going to get B way, way more than A.

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They have to be at least a little worried about recent trends. Reportedly, they've turned up the #Woke on

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See I’ve heard the opposite. They were going to tone down their usual “South Park” method of attacking any and everyone and going more DEI but they recognized it would be a death sentence for the game and have been reversing course as much as possible.