Grand Theft Auto VI gets pushed back to May 26, 2026 | Hacker News Reader

Grand Theft Auto VI gets pushed back to May 26, 2026

arstechnica.com

18 pointsstalfosknight21 comments

2028 for PC players but I am happy Rockstar / Take Two is sticking to their no crunch commitment. I'll wait.

Apparently this is a thing 0.

How interesting. Always better with a finished game coming late then an unfinished dumpster fire that makes people give up on you (still remember battlefield 4 when it came out).

0. https://www.thegamer.com/rockstar-reportedly-made-major-chan...

AAA development cycles are getting out of hand...

2001, 2002, 2004 - GTA3 Trilogy

2008 - GTA4

2013 - GTA5

2026 - GTA6? Assuming no more delays.

This one has been cooking for so long that they missed an entire console generation, GTA5 originally launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Naughty Dog is a similar story, the PS5 has been on shelves for nearly five years and their first original title for it doesn't even have a projected release year. Rumors are pointing to 2027 at the earliest.

Yes. I think eventually the AAA game industry is going to crash and we will go back to smaller teams and less ambitious games, because it does seem unsustainable.

You can already observe this in the popularity of independent games.

Unless you're very wealthy, chasing the AAA game peak performance on PC is becoming unattainable. You can easily get an Intel Arc B580 card for ~300 to play at 1440p regular settings, but to take advantage of the highest quality at NVIDIA 4090 or 5090 you're looking at $4000 just for the GPU. AAA games just broke their price ceiling too with Nintendo going for $80/90 regular game prices for their headliners, and Microsoft following. There are so many wonderful independent games studios that aren't competing for the top performance, or twitchy shooters that require such high hardware that it becomes serious competition for AAA. A few recent favorites that don't require anything top end hardware wise are Psychonauts 2, Balatro, Wanderstop, Kitsune Tails, Shovel Knight, Cuisineer. Since Doom: The Dark Ages requires a raytracing card, it's out of reach for me.

Peak performance has always been pricy. Chasing the 4k dragon is not worth it for most people, but inflation adjusted a 2,000$ gaming PC from 1998 would be $3,900 today.

I’ve got a 4k monitor, but only use that resolution on old games as it’s not like 1080p suddenly sucks.

and today that doesn't even cover a top end GPU.

2k wasn’t a top end PC in 1998 either, just the high end of normal and you can get a high end of normal system for well under 4k today.

Ever increasing number of gamers is what’s been supporting the system.

  1997 GTA I 3,000,000
  1999 GTA II 2,000,000
  2001 GTA III 14,500,000
  2008 GTA IV 25,000,000
  2013 GTA V  205,000,000

https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto

Nothing guarantees they’ll sell 100+M copies of GTA VI, but it’s definitely going to beat 3 million which used to be a really successful game.

GTA Online in GTA V changed the game entirely for Rockstar and they realized they could make oodles of money off it. I'd say we would have seen GTA VI come out in ~2018 had it not been for online, and we would have seen a couple of single player DLC's too.

I don't think GTA V was originally intended to have such an expansive online component and they just had to keep duct taping shit to make it all work because it was a cash cow. Now I think the reason GTA VI is taking so long is they are trying to get the online "framework" right so they can push content for the next decade.

What are these dates? GTA 1, 2, and 3 were 1997, 1999, 2001, not the dates you mention. Especially GTA 3 wasn't last year.

GTA 3 triology = GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas

I mean the 3D trilogy, GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas.

And oops I wrote 2024 instead of 2004 for SA, fixed.

Ahh I see, that makes sense, thanks.

This is why Dan Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and left Sam in charge. Dan went on to start a new game company with the aim of returning to sane development cycles. He's 51 now and just wants to make games.

What I don't get is why don't they milk their engines a bit more.

I would expect it to make sense to pump out a few more games after GTA 5 based on the same engine. New maps, new stories, same mechanics. I know GTA Online exists but that's something else entirely.

The same goes for Bethesda. The last Elder Scrolls game we've had was Skyrim. Why haven't they taken that game and re-released it in a few years on a new map and with a new story? It seems wasteful to not do so.

Please god no. Bethesdas engine has been trash by modern standards for like 15 years. It should have been sent to the recycle bin after Skyrim. Their games are almost as crippled as Nintendo’s have been by the ~~switch~~ potato. Even the Skyrim remaster they just released feels like PS2 tech.

You don't have to like the game, but Creation Engine was definitely not "trash" by 2010 standards, lol.

Once you've played a version of it heavily modded, you realize that if they were to do this, they'd need to improve it up to the level the modding community has already. The mod community has added a ton of free content to the game and added a lot of graphical and quality of life improvements. They need to compete with that as well. Instead they chose not to compete and have paid mods which didn't go over too well.

I've played heavily modded versions of both of those games, but let's not kid ourselves that the available mods are anything like another first party game would be. (I'm alluding to the scale and richness of the world, story playtime, cast and such.)

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