More than thirteen years separate GTA V from GTA 6. Here is what happened in between — by date, and without the rumours.
The long pause after GTA V
GTA V came out on 17 September 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was then re-released three times: on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014, on PC in 2015, and on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2022. Each release extended the life of the game and of GTA Online — and with them the gap in the main series.
Inside the studio, the main project of those years was Red Dead Redemption 2. It shipped on 26 October 2018, and only then did Rockstar have the people free for the next GTA. That is why the gap between entries became a record: before this, the series had moved on every four or five years.
2022: confirmation and the leak
On 4 February 2022 Rockstar said officially, for the first time, that development of the next Grand Theft Auto was “well underway”. The short post carried no title and no details, but it ended years of speculation that the studio had given up on single-player games for the sake of online.
That summer Bloomberg, citing staff, reported the outlines: a fictional take on Miami, two leads, one of them a Latina woman. All of it was later confirmed.
On 18 September 2022 came the biggest leak in the industry’s history: around ninety videos of early builds appeared on a fan forum. The next day Rockstar confirmed a network intrusion and promised that development would continue as planned. The person responsible turned out to be a British teenager linked to the Lapsus$ hacking group.
The leak showed an unfinished game — debug text, grey models, placeholder animation. Judging the final product by it made as much sense as judging a film by its storyboard.
2023: the first trailer
In November 2023 Sam Houser announced that the first trailer would arrive in early December, in time for Rockstar’s 25th anniversary. The premiere was set for 5 December, but on the evening of the 4th a copy leaked online and the studio posted the trailer itself a few hours early.
Set to Tom Petty’s “Love Is a Long Road”, it showed Vice City, the swamps, Lucia in a prison uniform and a social media parody stitched from Florida-style news clips. In its first day it passed 90 million views on YouTube — a record for a non-music video. Its final card gave the first release window: 2025, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
2025: two delays and a second trailer
On 2 May 2025 Rockstar moved the release to 26 May 2026, saying it needed the time to deliver the quality players expect.
On 6 May 2025, four days after the delay, the second trailer arrived — almost three minutes set to the Pointer Sisters’ “Hot Together”. The official site was updated alongside it with profiles of Jason and Lucia, six supporting characters and six regions of the state, from Vice City to Mount Kalaga National Park. The studio stressed that the video was captured entirely in-game on a PlayStation 5.
On 6 November 2025 came the second delay, to 19 November 2026. This time Rockstar named an exact day, and it has not moved since.
2026: the final stretch
Pre-orders opened in the summer of 2026. On 27 August the third major video arrived — an extended look running almost 27 minutes, which premiered on Netflix and reached YouTube the same day, a few hours later.
In September the game took the cover of Game Informer, and according to StopGame, Rockstar officially confirmed that the map of Leonida is roughly twice the size of GTA V’s. All of it has been covered in detail in our news feed since.
What it adds up to
Put the dates together and an interesting picture appears. Nearly five years will pass between official confirmation and release, and nearly three between the first trailer and launch day. For Rockstar this is a normal pace: Red Dead Redemption 2 was revealed two years before it shipped, and it was delayed twice as well.
Two delays in a row usually worry players, but at this studio they are closer to routine than to a warning sign. What matters more is that the date has held since November 2025 and that Rockstar has moved from teasers to detailed showings. That is how the studio usually behaves once a game is assembled and only polish remains.
The weeks left before 19 November are when the last trailers, details about GTA Online and possibly the first reviews are most likely to appear. The countdown on the home page shows exactly how long is left.
