2026’s autumn release schedules are pure insanity but it’s not GTA 6’s fault

This year’s autumn release schedules are the busiest the video games industry has ever seen, and it is not going to end well for many publishers.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for video games, with multiple major preview showcases and many new announcements, trailers, and release dates. There’s been welcome surprises, unwanted disappointments, and the expected level of bafflement over the peculiar decisions that games publishers make.

Nintendo’s strange priorities and Microsoft’s increasingly unconvincing explanation of its exclusivity policies have been amongst the biggest news stories, but another major issue has only become obvious in retrospect, when new release schedules were drawn up and everyone could see what a bloodbath this autumn is going to be.

There was always going to be a major problem, because no competing game is going to launch within a month either side of GTA 6, on November 19. That means that eight weeks of the busiest gift-buying season of the year have now essentially been cordoned off, with only Barbie Rewind and a few indie games daring to wade into no man’s land.

The list below shows every major game being released this autumn and December, and, as you can see, the end of September is especially mad. Only yesterday, Valor Mortis (the Napoleonic zombie game that got unveiled at Xbox Games Showcase) decided to change its release date or otherwise it would’ve been one of three major titles launching on September 24… with another one due on September 25.

The problem is that Valor Mortis only moved as far as October 13, because it didn’t dare get any closer to GTA 6 and presumably there was a financial imperative that it launch this year. It’s one of the lower profile games on the schedule but so many other expensive, triple-A games are in the same position, including a new Silent Hill, the sequel to Control, the reboot of Onimusha, a new Ace Combat, and the controversial Gears Of War: E-Day.

To make matters worse, this isn’t even a complete list, as EA Sports FC 27 hasn’t been announced yet and it usually comes out in late September. There are also many more double-A and indie games coming out during the same period, including titles such as Lords Of The Fallen 2 and Stupid Never Dies, that haven’t announced a date yet. Nor has The Duskbloods or Zelda: Ocarina Of Time on Switch 2, with Nintendo historically paying no mind to the release dates of other games.

Other publishers can’t afford to be so indifferent, and it is guaranteed that many of these games will underperform, simply because there’s too much coming out in too short a span of time. And if you’re looking at the list and thinking there’s only one or two you’re interested in then fine, it’s not a problem for you. But it certainly is for companies at a time when games are so expensive to make that a single high-profile failure can shutter an entire studio.

What almost makes the situation worse is that none of this is anyone’s fault. GTA 6 had to come out sometime and when it was scheduled for release earlier in the year there was a similar exclusion zone around it – although there’s no doubt that coming out just ahead of Christmas does make things even worse for other games.

Publishers weren’t able to avoid having the same release date either, because they didn’t know when other games were scheduled until they were publicly announced. Unless they had an unusually close relationship with a rival, they just had to pick their date and hope for the best, which certainly hasn’t worked out for anyone that chose September 24.

Perhaps other games will change their release date, now that everyone knows how things have worked out, but many will be loath to do so, since they’ve already started pre-orders, and will just hope that someone else moves first – which they probably won’t.

It’s hard to know what lessons to draw from all this. It’s easy to say that companies should make better use of the rest of the year, to release new games, rather than ensuring the usual summer games drought. But they have been getting better at that and while they’re not as good as the movie industry, at using the whole of the calendar, things are definitely not as bad as they used to be. And besides, video games make great gifts, so there’s always going to be more of them in the autumn (when it’s darker and colder outside).

The overriding problem is simply that there’s too many games and not enough people with the time, money, or inclination to play them. Rather than being a runaway success, that redefined how video games are consumed, Game Pass showed just how conservative most people are in their game choices, even when faced with a wide choice of titles that are free at the point of use.

Most people only have the time and desire to play a few different games each year and while the price of them is off-putting it’s not necessarily the primary problem. What at first seems to be a one-off release schedule traffic jam exposes some of the deep-seated problems with the modern games industry, where too many games are chasing too few customers. There’s no obvious answer to that problem but the consequences of it this year may be severe for many video game companies.

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