GTA 6 will release after April 2025 to appease stockholders

The next entry in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series is set to release in 2025, but the launch of GTA 6 won’t happen until sometime after April of that year.

With the GTA 6 reveal trailer now out in the wild, fans are eagerly awaiting the upcoming return to Vice City. While some huge leaks early in development worried some fans, the next GTA game is undoubtedly looking fantastic.

Following recent financial reports from publisher 2K, video game industry analysts predict that the GTA 6 release date won’t occur until after April 2025 to appease quarterly financials for the company’s stockholders.

Via VGC, analysts Nick McKay and Michael Pachter predict that 2K’s financials peg the next GTA game’s release date sometime after April 2025.

“We can only surmise that GTA VI has slipped out of FY:25, in-line with our earlier expectation,” the analysts explain. “Management had said that next year’s bookings number will be just over $7 billion, a far cry from its initial comments of $8 billion in May, and its first revision of just under $8 billion in November.”

This change in financial expectations when compared to predictions of GTA 6 launch sales does suggest that the open world crime game will launch sometime after the financial year. This means that the game is more likely to launch sometime in late 2025, perhaps mirroring the October release date of Red Dead Redemption 2.

A late-year release date for GTA 6 does make a lot of sense. After all, everyone will want to play the next Grand Theft Auto game, and most will want a console for Christmas that can play the game. At least until a PC port of the title is in development.

Since its release 11 years ago, GTA V has sold almost 200 million copies across three console generations. With GTA V weekly update patches still releasing every Thursday, the massively popular open world game is still bringing in new players all the time. And it’s fully expected that GTA 6 will be the same.

At the time of writing, GTA 6 is set to release in 2025 for Xbox Series X, Series S and PS5.