The two GTA 6 delays might have been frustrating for you, but they were definitely worse for Strauss Zelnick, CEO of the game’s publisher, Take-Two Interactive, who reportedly asked the unfortunate Rockstar dev who told him about them if they were “kidding.”
Speaking to Bloomberg, Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, said she had to call up Zelnick twice – once when GTA 6 was delayed out of Fall 2025 to a May 2026 date, and then again to say that it needed a second delay, this time from May to November. The second time, Zelnick struggled to take the news.
“I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding’,” Kolbe says of her second call with Zelnick. Thankfully, the Take-Two CEO was pretty understanding in the end: “Once we talked through why, he got it. And I think we are really lucky that he is as reasonable as he is, because a lot of people would say ‘you just better figure out how to ship it’. And we have been really, really lucky that we have not found ourselves in that place, because that happens to a lot of teams, and we’ve all played those games. It’s not great.”
We’ve definitely seen the results of games that are pushed too early – Cyberpunk 2077 springs immediately to mind, in spite of its redemption arc, but many others have launched too soon and never gathered the momentum they needed to thrive. Granted, in this case, Zelnick is in the enviable position of having the biggest launch of the decade waiting in the wings, meaning the extra year of investment in GTA 6 will probably amount to little more than a rounding error in its eventual bottom line.