Imagine, for a moment, that you can see the future, and it is one where Grand Theft Auto 6 is a massive flop. Maybe it's a technical disaster. Maybe it doesn't connect with anyone. Maybe industry rumors about a $100 price tag are true and, in the economic picture of summer 2026, that's just not tenable for anyone. Does that seem absurd? Perhaps it shouldn't.
This is not about rooting for the game to fail, or hating on a game that no one has played yet. Rather, this is about perspective, and a sober assessment of an industry entirely in the thrall of a single release.
The first week of May has been instructive here. On Friday, May 2, Rockstar Games triggered the video game industry's Great Exhale: Announcing Grand Theft Auto 6, previously scheduled to release in 2025, will now arrive May 26, 2026. The fallout was immediate: Shares for Rockstar's publisher Take-Two Interactive took a dive, mainstream news outlets published reports, and YouTubers began uploading in earnest. The following Tuesday, Rockstar released the second trailer for GTA 6, along with the first detailed descriptions of the game's plot and characters.
As early looks go, the trailer is quite impressive and admirably restrained. GTA 6, by virtue of Rockstar's stature and reputation for tremendously expensive, painstakingly detailed video games, is expected to look and sound like nothing else on the market, achieving a level of verisimilitude that most developers can only dream of. The trailer is also effectively meaningless, divulging nothing about what it's like to play GTA 6. That's fine, par for the course, even. Mostly, it serves to prop up the business of anticipating GTA 6, which is almost more important than the game itself.
Right now, as you read this, countless people are writing very diligently about Grand Theft Auto 6, a game that will not arrive for another year. They are not doing this for you. They are doing it for the algorithm. The algorithm has wants and needs more important than yours, because the algorithm is what determines what Google surfaces and what it buries, whether a publication will get enough clicks to justify its existence or a YouTuber enough views to fund the next video. In a very real sense, the reader barely matters, or at least not as much as the algorithmic black box that determines whether or not the reader knows a video or article even exists.
This is why, prior to May 2, you could read many thousands of words and watch hundreds of hours of content about Grand Theft Auto 6, even though everyone more or less had access to the same amount of public information: just a brief press release accompanied by a single 90-second trailer released in December 2023. Many more words and hours of video will spin up in the wake of this second trailer, long after the shallow well of concrete analysis has run dry.
The byzantine logic that governs discoverability – on Google, on YouTube, on any number of social media platforms – changes all the time, but one of the best ways to game the system in your favor is to prime it. The machine doesn't know to regard a content creator as a Grand Theft Auto authority if that creator does not have an established track record of creating Grand Theft Auto content. So: If you want the algorithm to notice and prefer you when GTA 6 does arrive, you'd better start making content yesterday. Then, when Rockstar finally deems the game ready for release, you will be better positioned to reap the views you desire for your coverage of the actual game, justifying all that pre-content you diligently produced.
In a way, this is familiar. While games media is no longer the sole purview of enthusiast outlets, that culture still emerges in coverage of the biggest games. It's fun to speculate, after all, and the informed speculation of a journalist with expertise can also debunk the more egregious tall tales spun by shameless clout-chasers. Unfortunately, the algorithmic unmaking of digital media has turned many of us into shameless clout-chasers.
This is why the success of Grand Theft Auto 6 feels like an inevitable fact: Everyone who makes a living covering games, from the dwindling number of digital media outlets to the most popular YouTubers, needs it to be, which creates the perception that it will be. And if the media is that invested in GTA, because they have to be, then what chance does any other game have? As PC Gamers' Tyler Wilde noted earlier this year, weathering GTA 6's arrival – or, more importantly, calling its bluff and predicting May's delay – would be central to the survival of developers big and small.
Journalistic and business thinking converge here, in ways they should not. It is unwise in the former to treat anything as a foregone conclusion, but quite sensible in the business world to exude confidence, even if it appears foolish. The party that stands to benefit the most from GTA 6 being “good” is Rockstar; for the rest of us, no one wants to miss any potential windfall should video games' most dispassionate titan repeat its previous, astonishing successes. But the way that success trickles down has less to do with the game itself and more with the game as a media singularity, impossible to obtain perspective on.
Again, it's worth stressing: Games outlets and content creators are not dependent on GTA-related content, but rather the massive boost GTA 6's eventual release will bring them, which is not quite the same thing. Everyone, in other words, is preparing for a feeding frenzy, a bout of gluttony that will continue until diminishing returns demand a retreat back to business as usual. How long that spree will last is anyone's guess – Rockstar has kept people on the GTA treadmill through extensive support of GTA 5's online component, Grand Theft Auto Online. GTA Online is arguably the reason why 2013's Grand Theft Auto 5 has remained a fixture on sales charts, such a tremendous success that it's reasonable to argue that whatever shape its follow-up takes might be more important to Rockstar's fortunes than GTA 6. Reports suggest that Rockstar is very interested in repeating the GTA Online phenomenon, and if they are correct, the scale might be tremendous, a Roblox-style money-printer built on user-generated content.
Yet the event horizon here is Grand Theft Auto 6, not whatever GTA Online successor will presumably follow it, no matter how instrumental it may be. And an industry where a single release can be so potentially destabilizing or galvanizing is irreparably broken. The press should not need to spend this much energy on one series, in a desperate bid to please the algorithm. Game developers should not have to plan their own releases around GTA 6; GTA 6 should not be able to dominate so much attention.
There is virtually no chance that any new release can become the next Grand Theft Auto, and certainly not by simply being a video game. The money and time (and lack of investor pressure that comes with both) one would need to hire the talent and develop the tech to mount a challenge of comparable scale has all been hoovered up by the one percent of the games industry, the Fortnites and Robloxes and gacha behemoths of the world. But Fortnite has become an ad platform and a machine for user generated content. Reports have demonstrated that the Roblox empire is built on exploiting its very young userbase, a practice that might finally face scrutiny from regulators. And free-to-play gacha games are now elaborate enough to compete with the best console and PC games on offer, because they are full of ways to funnel players into gambling, and the longer you play, the more likely you are to make a habit of paying.
This is the new games industry, a greedier, more exploitative evolution of the one that existed when the last Grand Theft Auto was released. When you consider this, the all-encompassing fixation on Grand Theft Auto 6 takes on a new lens: It is a fetish in the religious sense, an object of power by which a world that no longer exists might return, if only for a little while. Expensive consoles, with few exclusive releases to justify their technical power, will have a game that will make owning one – or finally buying a new one – feel "worth it." Writers and creators working in the media ecosystem of guides and updates and takes will get outrageous numbers to send to their bosses, to make a case for their value, to prove their jobs are worth it. Gaming, as a hobby, will once again generate headlines for how much money the industry can make in such a brief amount of time, proving once again to the rest of the world that the medium is worth it.
And if Grand Theft Auto 6 can't pull that off, then nothing can, and we're all just wasting our time.
