Grand Theft Auto 6 Was Always Going To Share A Trailer After Its Delay

Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay to May 26, 2026 has been met with a mixture of relief, panic, and disappointment. The game’s developers are likely very happy about not having to crunch to meet an impossible deadline – and Rockstar management does seem to be adamantly against crunching this time round. Publishers and developers who would’ve been competing with the behemoth to release their games this year can now breathe a sigh of relief that their efforts won’t be completely overlooked.

Unless that publisher is Devolver Digital, which has vowed to release a game on the same day as GTA 6, no matter what. It’s a funny bit.

The shareholders were probably a little upset, since Rockstar’s stock price predictably dropped when the delay was announced, but it seems to be recovering gradually. And the fans… oh, the fans. They were very angry. They were saying their hype was dead. They were theorising that there’s going to be a second delay. It was very doom and gloom over there, until Rockstar dropped a second GTA trailer – but if you look at the pattern the studio has established, you could’ve guessed this would always have happened.

Here’s Why The GTA 6 Release Date Is Actually A Perfect Fit

This is a summer blockbuster in video game form.

GTA 6 Wasn’t Fitting Into The Typical Timeline

Let’s delve into why this delay seems like such a bad sign for players. As one Reddit user pointed out, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2’s marketing timelines look very different from GTA 6’s. There are usually trailers and screenshots released before and even alongside delay announcements, and both games were delayed twice before finally seeing the light of day. Till yesterday, GTA 6 had received only one trailer and a delay, with no screenshots or additional information at all.

To be fair, two data points don’t make a pattern. GTA 6 could well break from the timeline that GTA 5 and RDR2 established and release after a singular delay. I don’t particularly care either way – the game will come out eventually, and that’s good enough for me. But most people, especially the kind of fans that analyses moon phases to predict when the next trailer will drop, are not as apathetic or as willing to believe that the pattern will be broken. Without a trailer to prove that the game was on the way, these fans were going to assume the game would be delayed into 2026 or 2027, and they were going to crash out about it.

GTA 6's New Trailer Shows GTA Can Still Be A Political Satire Because Nothing Ever Changes

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still a commentary on America, it's just not concerned with the White House

No Trailer, No Hype

Let’s also remember that the first was posted in December of 2023. We’d had a whole one and a half years of silence from Rockstar, so I can’t begrudge fans for expecting, or at least wanting, new information. Nobody thought the game was dead, obviously, but its hype cycle might have been. Until now, staying silent and allowing fans to create tinfoil hat theories has worked for Rockstar, but its refusal to share new material began to work against it pretty quickly after the delay announcement.

There was an obvious way to buoy these fans’ spirits again: release a new trailer. Hell, a couple of screenshots would probably have been enough, but mercifully, we got far more than that. Rockstar has fed the conspiracy theorists by giving them new things to rip apart for minute details, and the fans will sustain themselves for another year, easily.

Rockstar is not typically the kind of studio to release trailers in response to fan desperation – indeed, its marketing strategy is largely based on sitting quiet and tightly managing the flow of information. But it was definitely the right time to assuage potential players’ fears of a second delay, and historically, it has released new material alongside delay announcements. Fans’ fears turned out to be paranoia – GTA 6 is well on the way, we just have to be patient.