I'm praying for Grand Theft Auto's reboot!

There's nothing I enjoy more than spending the entire afternoon playing some insipid video game. I hope the Grand Theft Auto version VI will be the cash cow that I've been hoping.

To put this in context, the NFL in 2025 has a viewing audience of approx 183 million fans.

Esports (idiots watching other idiots play video games) is expected to be viewed by 640 million people (more global audience). I'm at a loss for words. That happens infrequently.

Grand Theft Auto has been a goldmine — this latest delay had better be worth it for investors and gamers

Chart R

After more than a decade, Rockstar Games’ crown jewel — and one of the highest-grossing video games of all time — just hit the brakes again.

Last week, Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar's parent company and the gaming giant behind GTA, Red Dead Redemption, NBA 2K, and more, delayed the release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” to November 2026 — its second pushback this year after initially targeting a 2025 launch. CEO Strauss Zelnick said the extra months will help “finish the game with the high level of polish players expect and deserve.” Still, shares fell ~10% on the announcement, even as the company raised its full-year bookings outlook.

The delay elongates an already 12-year wait, with fans of the crime-packed franchise going without a new game since September 2013. Though big budget sequels now routinely take 5 years or more to make, GTA’s decade-plus hiatus still stands out. But, even as the franchise's share of Take-Two’s revenue has thinned, it’s still pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Back in 2014, GTA accounted for nearly 70% of Take-Two's sales after GTA V's record-breaking debut. Today, that share is closer to just 13%. The company's portfolio has become “increasingly diversified,” as Zelnick recently put it, spanning the NBA 2K sports franchise, Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption series, and Zynga’s mobile empire, which Take-Two acquired in 2022.

Still, most analysts remain bullish on GTA VI, according to Bloomberg, with some forecasting $2 billion in first-year revenue, as a holiday-season launch will likely boost sales by avoiding the slow summer months.

And it wouldn't be the first time Rockstar has chosen quality over punctuality: the studio's last major release, “Red Dead Redemption 2” (2018), took 8 years to make but raked in $725 million over its opening weekend alone. “It's always painful when we move a date,” Zelnick said in the earnings call, “and we've never regretted it in retrospect.”