Four thousand, eight hundred and eleven days. One hundred and fifty-eight months and two days. Thirteen years, two months and two days. Whatever way you want to frame it, it’s going to have been a heck of a long time between the launches of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto VI, should the latter manage to hit its latest release date on 19th November 2026.
Grand Theft Auto VI takes us all back to Vice City for Rockstar’s latest crime opera, and from what little we’ve seen of the game so far, it looks like they’re fully embracing all the wild excess and craziness that you’d expect from a fictionalised rendition of Miami and the Florida Keys.
It looks like this will be a bit of a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde style story with its two protagonists. Lucia Caminos is the series’ first female lead, who’s coming fresh out of a stint in prison, while Jason Duval is working for the local drug gangs. The pair are thrust together after a failed bank robbery, and are then swept up in a grand conspiracy.
As good as it will be to have a new GTA single player story, Rockstar and Take Two are really banking on the next rendition of GTA Online picking up where GTA V’s has left off. It’s this mode that has ballooned Take Two’s coffers over the past decade, and the online platform has grown and evolved massively to give players more things to do, more missions, more career paths to follow, and to front for user-generated content. A new GTA Online will necessarily get back to basics without feeling too hollow. A slow rollout of content was a big part of Red Dead Online’s rapid decline, though Rockstar will have a pretty singular focus for GTA.
But will it actually arrive in November? Rockstar games are prone to at least a couple delays, and GTA 6 has already had two. With its official announcement and reveal in December 2023, the tail was pinned on a 2025 release date, but as the higher ups lifted the blindfold to see if they’d hit the target, they realised they’d need to have another go. So it was that by the middle of last year, they decided to get a bit more specific and target May 2026 instead. Any closer? Not quite. Let’s try November 2026 now.
The problem is that, while there’s still an awful lot of people excited for the next GTA, each delay and announcement has kept the game release at least a year into the future. That’s far away enough that you can absolutely imagine the team getting to that latest six month deadline and realising they, once again, need a bit more time. In the here and now, that means we still have GTA 6 right up there within our top 5 Most Wanted Games of 2026, but we’re a touch more excited for a couple of other titles…
