Grand Theft Auto 6 delay is causing emergency meetings at other studios
Monster truck
I want Grand Theft Auto 6 to be good, and if I had to bet money on it, I'd guess it likely will be. The world is weird right now, and I want both you and me to enjoy driving a car into a man. It very much sounds like it's got Stephen Root from Barry in it! I love Stephen Root from Barry!
But, god, am I feeling some kind of way about it constantly sucking all the air out of the room. It feels less like we're looking forward to a game, more that we're in thrall to a captor that knows it can command attention whether it earns it or not. ( I do not believe Red Dead Redemption 2's excellence earns uncritical hype for all future projects, lest we forget Cyberpunk). There's plenty that can be said about the recent trailer, but if I had to sum up my own misgivings with it, it's that it has an air less of "look at this cool thing we made, we can't wait to share it with you", more dick-swinging swagger, a cocksure sense of, well, you're going to buy this anyway, here's some absurdly good-looking beer to tide you piggies over.
Anyway, the latest news - via a Bloomberg report entitled ‘Grand Theft Auto VI delay impacts every game company' - is that after already having caused various studios to scramble to change release dates, the fresh delay has now caused another round of lighting the panic beacons, and studios are now holding emergency meetings. Here's Bloomberg on a developer that had already delayed their game once to get out of GTA 6's drive-by firing line:
"Now they’re caught in a vise. Delaying their game a second time would be an expensive endeavor, ratcheting up the stakes for the eventual release. Then again, trying to come out alongside GTA VI could be catastrophic. But…what if they delay again and then GTA VI slips along with them? There’s no guarantee that May 2026 is a sure thing. The best hope might be to release in March, April or even early May, and hope it’s not disastrous."
Bloomberg does suggest that big competition like GTA 6 might not actually have this smothering effect on smaller titles, but the example given is that a single game - the very good Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - still sold a bunch of copies despite its release coinciding with the Oblivion Remaster. There's no mention of games like Post Trauma getting "buried" in Oblivion's wake, to the point where the publisher feels they need to re-release the game.
Unlike Oblivion's shadow drop, Rockstar have at least given a solid date. These things happen. But I still feel strange about the amount of tumult this as all caused. I actually feel like series devotees are getting off on this cultural dominance, too - red meat eatin', survival-of-the-fittest, my dad can beat up all your dads style. The sports-team-ifaction of game enjoying is not a new phenomena, but it is one that feels like it's reaching critical mass to the point where unaffiliated commentators gloating over sales figures can seem more prevalent than actual thoughts about what an actual game is actually like to play. Glory by osmosis? I dunno.
A lot of popular things are popular because they're very bloody good! But there has to a happy medium somewhere, right? The place between stilted water cooler conversations with baffled acquaintances each siloed off into their own niches, and this sort of behemothic, inescapable monoculture? Even if you bloody love a bit of rampant, unchecked capitalism, surely that's built on the foundation that competition is good for creativity? But GTA 6 is so absurdly massive, its dominance so assured, that it leaves no room for competition from the bottom up. It can only terraform and crush would-be hopefuls to dust and drippings from the top down.
There's a decent glug of selfish umbrage in all this, of course. Any non-independent games website is all but forced to report on any new happenings with GTA 6 whether we find them interesting or not, assuming we value our own survival. It all leaves me reminded that any sense of Rockstar being in any way countercultural is surely an ancient, unfunny joke by this point. If it walks and talks and acts like the man, it's the man, and to quote Hatsune Miku, no one man should have all that power.