GTA 6 release date: Rockstar has it set for 19 November 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, after two delays off an original 2025 window. The Standard Edition is 79.99 dollars and pre-orders opened on 25 June. On 27 August Rockstar finally showed 26 minutes of it. This page is the announcement trail, updated 4 September 2026.
The first official word came attached to other news. On 4 February 2022 Rockstar published a Newswire post about the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions of Grand Theft Auto V, and near the end of it wrote that active development for the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is well underway. No name, no platforms, no window. The company said it would share more when it was ready and pointed readers back at the Newswire.
Roughly ninety clips of pre-release footage were posted to GTAForums, a fan site with no connection to Rockstar. This was more than a year before the game had a name or a date, and the videos showed work-in-progress builds with debug text on screen. Rockstar confirmed a network intrusion. The footage was never fully scrubbed off the internet, which is why the 2022 build is still the version some people picture when they think about this game.
Rockstar posted that in early December it would release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. The post was signed by Sam Houser, the studio president, which is unusual enough at Rockstar to be a signal in itself. On 1 December the company set the premiere for Tuesday 5 December.
What the trailer established: the state of Leonida, a modern-day Vice City, two protagonists named Jason and Lucia, and a release window of 2025.
The trailer went up on 4 December, roughly sixteen hours ahead of the scheduled premiere, after a copy appeared on X. Rockstar posted it itself with a note saying the trailer had leaked and asking people to watch the real thing on YouTube, then had the leaked upload taken down. Rockstar had announced the premiere date itself three days earlier and did not keep it.
YouTube's own blog recorded 93 million views in the first 24 hours and stated that this was a new record for the 24-hour debut of a non-music video. YouTube also counted more than 250 million views of videos related to Grand Theft Auto VI across the platform over the same two days. Both figures are YouTube's, sourced to its data for 4 and 5 December 2023, and neither has been revised since.
Rockstar published a short letter. Grand Theft Auto VI would now release on 26 May 2026. The text apologised and said the interest around a new Grand Theft Auto had been humbling for the team. It asked for patience while the studio finished the work. Take-Two shares fell around 8 per cent in early trading, which is the market putting a number on a slip of roughly eight months.
Four days after the delay letter, Rockstar released the second trailer and published the story summary that still sits on the game's site. Jason and Lucia know the deck is stacked against them. An easy score goes wrong and drops them inside a criminal conspiracy running across the state of Leonida. That paragraph has not changed since. It appears word for word on the pre-order page fifteen months later.
Rockstar dismissed a group of staff over 30 and 31 October 2025. The IWGB, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, puts the number of its own members dismissed at 31; press reporting at the time put the total at 34. Rockstar said the dismissals were for gross misconduct, and later specified that those concerned had distributed and discussed confidential information, including features of unannounced titles, in a public forum. The IWGB says the discussions took place in a private Discord used for union organising and that nothing about any game was made public. Rockstar has said any claim the dismissals were linked to union membership or activity is false and misleading. Both accounts are on the record and both are contested.
Rockstar published a second letter setting the date at Thursday 19 November 2026, saying the extra months would let the team finish the game with the level of polish players expect. Take-Two put the same news out with its quarterly results the same day, which is a decision about timing: a delay disclosed inside an earnings release reaches investors and players in one movement.
On the fourth quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, Take-Two chairman and chief executive Strauss Zelnick reconfirmed 19 November and gave the sold-in figure for Grand Theft Auto V as nearly 230 million units. Red Dead Redemption 2 was given as more than 85 million. Full-year net bookings came in at 6.7 billion dollars, about 750 million above the guidance the company had issued twelve months earlier.
A UK employment tribunal rejected Rockstar's attempt to strike the blacklisting claims out of the case brought by the dismissed workers. Blacklisting, in the union's definition, is the compiling of information about workers involved in union activity in order to discriminate against them. The ruling means every allegation the IWGB has made can be tested at a full hearing. The union announced the same day that the final hearing had been listed for 10 September to 15 October 2026.
Rockstar posted that pre-orders would open on 25 June, and told people to add the game to a wishlist on the PlayStation Store or the Microsoft Store to be alerted.
The follow-up post the day before opening carried most of the detail worth having. Pre-orders would start at midnight local time. There would be a Standard Edition and an Ultimate Edition. Every purchase made before 20 November gets the Vintage Vice City Pack. Digital pre-orders can begin pre-loading on 12 November, and the physical version, which contains a download code in the box, reaches shops on the same day. The post also states plainly that Grand Theft Auto VI is a single player experience, which is the clearest thing Rockstar has published about the absence of an online mode at launch.
Pre-orders opened globally at midnight local time. Take-Two's own results release gives the Standard Edition price as 79.99 dollars. The Ultimate Edition has been widely reported at 99.99 dollars. That figure does not appear on any of the Rockstar Newswire posts read for this page, so it carries the weight of reporting only. The deluxe tier and the collector's edition that circulated in earlier coverage do not exist. There are two editions.
Arion Kurtaj, found by a UK court to have carried out the Rockstar hack as part of the Lapsus$ group, was sentenced in 2023 to an indefinite hospital order after a psychiatric assessment; the jury had been asked whether he committed the hacks, with the question of criminal intent removed from its remit. The Rockstar intrusion was carried out while he was under police protection in a Travelodge, using a television, an Amazon Fire TV Stick and a phone. BBC correspondent Joe Tidy, who covered the original case, reported in mid-July 2026 that Kurtaj had been moved to an ordinary prison and was awaiting a retrial listed for November. That listing comes from Tidy and has not been checked against a court record for this page.
Rockstar announced that Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look would premiere on Netflix on Thursday 27 August at 15:00 ET, and go up on the Rockstar Games YouTube channel and the game's own site at 21:00 ET the same day. Netflix therefore holds a six-hour window. Brandon Riegg, Netflix's VP of nonfiction series, called the anticipation around the game unprecedented and framed the deal as ambitious storytelling from another medium reaching a large audience. Rockstar's post does not say the video contains gameplay. A great deal of the coverage assumes it does.
Take-Two reported first quarter fiscal 2027 results for the quarter ended 30 June 2026. Net bookings were 1.39 billion dollars, down 3 per cent year on year, with 84 per cent of that coming from recurrent consumer spending. The company reiterated its fiscal 2027 net bookings outlook of 8.0 to 8.2 billion dollars. Zelnick's quote in the release names the 19 November launch directly. The product table in the same release lists Grand Theft Auto VI on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for 19 November 2026, which is the plainest confirmation on the record as this page was written.
Worth stating, because the gaps get filled in by guesswork. There is no announced PC version and no announced PC date. There is no announced online component. Rockstar never called the Extended Look a third trailer and there has been no third trailer. Pre-order numbers were called unprecedented on an earnings call with no figure attached, and no figure has followed. The 27 August showcase did close several of these gaps by simply answering: no microtransactions, 30 frames per second, roughly three times the map of Red Dead Redemption 2. On everything left on this list the accurate summary is still that the company has said nothing, which is different from saying it will not happen.
The Extended Look ran 26 minutes. It premiered on Netflix at 15:00 ET on Thursday 27 August and went up on YouTube and rockstargames.com/VI six hours later, exactly as announced. What it showed: Lucia and Jason working jobs, switching between them mid-mission, cover shooting and melee, several ways of taking a car depending on what the player is carrying. Then a long stretch of everything that is not crime, which is where Rockstar spent its running time. Airboats, basketball, diving, the gym, jetskis, kayaks, racing, boxing, base jumping, nightclubs. What it said out loud, which matters more. The map is about three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. One developer's playthrough of the story ran roughly 80 hours. The game runs at 30 frames per second on PS5 and Xbox Series X, with a performance mode described as a possibility rather than a promise. There are no microtransactions. No generative AI was used to make it. A criminal profile tracks what the player does, in the way the honour system did in Red Dead.
The final hearing opened on 10 September 2026 at the Glasgow Tribunals Centre, before Employment Judge Lucy Wiseman, and is listed to run five weeks. The IWGB held a rally outside beforehand. Of the 34 people dismissed in October 2025, 31 were in the UK and three in Canada. The workers are asking the tribunal to find the dismissals unfair and to order reinstatement or compensation, and the union is also pressing the blacklisting claim that Rockstar failed to strike out in June. Rockstar's opening submissions, obtained by Rock Paper Shotgun and Game Developer, ran past 100 pages and disclosed that the company had an informant inside the private union Discord for more than two years before the dismissals. The union says the server was invite-only, verified against Rockstar's own Slack, and that its largest room held close to 350 people. Dayne Oram, one of the dismissed, gave evidence on 11 September. He said he believed a 2023 petition on returning to the office, signed by around 150 staff, became the basis of a watch list. Rockstar's counsel put it to him that 141 of the 154 signatories were never dismissed. Oram replied that the list was used to watch for activity the company found distasteful, and accepted that discussion on the server could sometimes get out of hand.
The June listing gave 15 October as the last day. The IWGB, Rockstar's own lawyers and the AFP all put the end of the hearing at 16 October, five weeks before the game is scheduled to release. Thousands of pages of evidence were still to be heard when the first week closed.
Rockstar has said digital pre-orders can begin pre-loading on 12 November 2026, seven days ahead of launch, and that the physical edition arrives in shops the same day carrying a download code in the box. Both dates come off the 24 June Newswire post. Neither has happened yet.
Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to release on Thursday 19 November 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, at 79.99 dollars for the Standard Edition. Rockstar has held that date since 6 November 2025 and Take-Two reiterated it on 7 August 2026. It has moved twice before. No outcome is predicted on this page; it records what was announced and when. As of 27 September: the game is still dated 19 November. Sony showed a limited-edition GTA 6 DualSense controller on 10 September. Rockstar has still announced no third trailer, no PC version and no online component.
The Vintage Vice City Pack goes to every pre-order and every purchase made before 20 November 2026, so this date is the edge of that offer as Rockstar published it. Compiled on 11 August 2026, brought up to date on 4 September 2026, and again on 27 September 2026 with the first two weeks of the tribunal, reported by Sky News, The Scotsman, Game Developer and Rock Paper Shotgun. As of that date the release was still set for 19 November. Primary sources: Rockstar's own Newswire posts of 2 May 2025, 6 May 2025, 6 November 2025, 18 and 24 June 2026 and 6 August 2026; Take-Two's fiscal Q1 2027 results release; Netflix's Tudum announcement; the IWGB's statements on the dismissals and the tribunal; and YouTube's own blog for the 2023 view counts. The 27 August Extended Look was watched and cross-checked against contemporaneous coverage at GamesRadar, PC Gamer and Kotaku. Where a number rests on reporting rather than on a company statement, the event says so. Photographs are Wikimedia Commons files of Miami, the Everglades and the hardware, since there is no free imagery of an unreleased game.