Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay to July 28, 2025 has been met with a mixture of relief, panic, and disappointment. The game’s developers are likely very happy about not having to crunch to meetan impossible deadline– and Rockstar managementdoesseem to be adamantly against crunchingthis time round. Publishers and developers who would’ve been competing with the behemoth to release their games this year can now breathe a sigh of relief that their efforts won’t be completely overlooked.
Unless that publisher is Devolver Digital, which hasvowed to release a game on the same day as GTA 6, no matter what. It’s a funny bit.
The shareholders were probably a little upset, since Rockstar’s stock price predictably dropped when the delay was announced, but it seems to be recovering gradually. And the fans… oh, the fans. They were very angry. They weresaying their hype was dead. They were theorising thatthere’s going to be a second delay. It was very doom and gloom over there, until Rockstar dropped a second GTA trailer – but if you look at the pattern the studio has established, you could’ve guessed this would always have happened.
GTA 6 Wasn’t Fitting Into The Typical Timeline
Let’s delve intowhythis delay seems like such a bad sign for players. As one Reddit user pointed out,Grand Theft Auto 5andRed Dead Redemption 2’s marketing timelines look very different from GTA 6’s. There are usually trailers and screenshots released before and even alongside delay announcements, and both games were delayed twice before finally seeing the light of day. Till yesterday, GTA 6 had received only one trailer and a delay, with no screenshots or additional information at all.
To be fair, two data points don’t make a pattern. GTA 6 could well break from the timeline that GTA 5 and RDR2 established and release after a singular delay. I don’t particularly care either way – the gamewillcome out eventually, and that’s good enough for me. But most people, especially the kind of fans thatanalyses moon phases to predict when the next trailer will drop, are not as apathetic or as willing to believe that the pattern will be broken. Without a trailer to prove that the gamewason the way, these fans were going to assume the game would be delayed into 2026 or 2027, and theyweregoing to crash out about it.
No Trailer, No Hype
Let’s also remember that the first was posted in December of 2023. We’d had a whole one and a half years of silence from Rockstar, so I can’t begrudge fans for expecting, or at least wanting, new information. Nobody thought the game wasdead, obviously, but its hype cycle might have been. Until now, staying silent and allowing fans to create tinfoil hat theories has worked for Rockstar, but its refusal to share new material began to work against it pretty quickly after the delay announcement.
There was an obvious way to buoy these fans’ spirits again: release a new trailer. Hell, a couple of screenshots would probably have been enough, but mercifully, we got far more than that. Rockstar has fed the conspiracy theorists by giving them new things to rip apart for minute details, and the fans will sustain themselves for another year, easily.
Rockstar is not typically the kind of studio to release trailers in response to fan desperation – indeed, its marketing strategy is largely based on sitting quiet and tightly managing the flow of information. But it was definitely the right time to assuage potential players’ fears of a second delay, and historically, ithasreleased new material alongside delay announcements. Fans’ fears turned out to be paranoia – GTA 6 is well on the way, we just have to be patient.
