How the 2024 GTA 6 Delay Rumors Worked — and What Was Actually Said
A rumor said the game had slipped to 2026. A reporter checked, said something careful, and watched it get flattened into the opposite of what he meant.
In September 2024, an unsourced claim circulated that GTA VI had been internally delayed to 2026 despite Take-Two's public Fall 2025 window. Jason Schreier checked it and posted what he found: "Good news is that six Rockstar employees all told me they have not heard of any delay."
He then added the caveat that most coverage dropped. "Six staff told me they weren't informed of a delay," he wrote. "For all I know, Rockstar's executive team could have decided months ago to delay GTA VI without telling the company." And: "it's a big, ambitious game and could very well slip! Too much time left to say anything definitive."
That is reporting on the absence of an internal announcement. It was widely rewritten as "Schreier confirms no delay," which is not what he said and not something he was in a position to say.
Three months later, on Kinda Funny Games Daily, he offered a personal read: "I would be shocked if it doesn't slip to 2026. I'd be shocked if it actually hits Fall 2025, but as of right now, Take-Two is saying that they're on track." He was explicit that this was assessment, not sourced reporting.
He was right. The delay to May 2026 was announced on May 2, 2025, roughly five months later.
There is a broader point here about how this beat works. Bloomberg reported that December that rival publishers were holding back their own fall 2025 date announcements until they could see whether GTA VI would hold — the game's schedule was dictating an entire industry's calendar. In that environment, a careful sentence from a credible reporter gets compressed, amplified and stripped of its qualifiers within hours.
Which is why this archive quotes the qualifiers.