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The GTA 6 slipping release date has me convinced it could redefine both the PS5 and the PS6 [Gamify My Life]

Grand Theft Auto VI stands poised to send shockwaves through the gaming industry, but it could have a bigger impact than just massive sales for current and next-gen the PlayStation consoles.

Gamify My Life GTA 6 Delay Speculation — Image credit: Rockstar / Popverse

Features by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Dec 15 2025

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Believe it or not, there was a time when GTA 6 was going to be the biggest game of 2025. Then the release date slipped to April 2026… and again to November 2026. Rockstar has decided that they need the better part of a year to get Grand Theft Auto VI ready to play. We’re all sitting here wondering what this game will do for Rockstar, considering how much money its predecessor has made them, but I’m genuinely wondering how the new GTA 6 release date is going to impact the PS5 at the end of its lifecycle.

The delay of GTA 6 has proven to be almost as big a news story as the game itself. It has caused competitors to update their calculus around their own titles and made fans wheel out the most overused Shigeru Miyamoto quote ever. This isn’t me saying that the next Grand Theft Auto game won’t benefit from another few months of development, but the idea that a delayed game will inevitably become good is flawed when Dragon Age: Veilguard exists.

Rockstar wouldn’t delay this game unless they felt they had to. GTA 6 has every chance to be another billion-dollar game for the company, and every delay only delays that payday and raises fan expectations. The fact that the payday is going to happen feels as inevitable as the sunrise at this point. What I’m interested in is how Grand Theft Auto’s release date will change the sense of urgency for Sony to move on to the PS6.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a single game can sell a console for the masses unless that game happens to be Mario Kart World, apparently. The vast majority of people who are going to buy a PS5 already have one, and Sony has managed to take a sluggish start to the PlayStation 5’s lifecycle and turn it into a reasonable (but not overwhelming) success. GTA is probably going to be the last big game for the system that isn’t co-developed for the PS6, and if it is as big a hit as we’re all expecting it to be, it could give the PS5 a small but important bump before its successor makes it completely obsolete.

The PS6 hasn’t been announced yet, but it is undoubtedly being developed at Sony. Just as certain is the fact that GTA 6 will get a next-gen port or upgrade when the new console comes out. There is a reasonable possibility that the next PlayStation console is announced for a November 2026 launch – not a good possibility, but certainly a non-zero chance – which would put it on shelves at almost the same time as GTA 6. In that case, does Rockstar try to develop a PS6 version of the game, much like Nintendo did with Breath of the Wild when it came out in the final months of the Wii U’s viability?

Heck, if I were putting my conspiracy theorist hat on, I’d wonder if Rockstar has delayed GTA 6 so it could launch on both the PS5 and PS6 consoles, giving the legacy console a mighty swansong and a solid launch title for the next-gen system. After all, with Microsoft slowly taking itself out of the console conversation, the PlayStation represents a far larger chunk of Grand Theft Auto’s audience than it would have two or three years ago. It is unlikely we’ll get GTA 6 on the Switch 2 for several years, so it is just the Sony and PC audiences that really matter at this point.

This is just speculation on my part, of course, but with almost a year until GTA 6 comes out, all we’ve really got is wild speculation to get us through. Games like Grand Theft Auto VI don’t come around that often, and its release has the potential to impact more than just Rockstar’s bottom line; it could change the trajectory of the PS5 and the PS6 in the next year.

The gaming industry has come a long way since Pong blew all our minds in the 70s. We've got everything you need to know about the next big thing in games. Of course, Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be the big game of 2026, but there are plenty of other games coming out between now and then. Here is our starter guide for every gamer: