Introduction: The team at Rockstar Games decided that they must do what no fan wanted to hear and delay the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. The latest installment of the GTA series has been moved into 2026, with the game having a launch date sometime in May next year. However, to smooth things over with their audience, the developers also launched the second trailer for the same title, showing good reason why this unpublished game is the most well-known gaming title in the entire world. The impact that GTA 6 will have not just on the gaming industry but the entire global popular culture is already turning into an unprecedented juggernaut of money, influence, and entertainment evolution.
Article: 2025 was already, for many millions of gamers across the world, a year that will be marked by the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar Games, a company that published its latest title all the way back in 2018 with the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2, acknowledged that it has been working on the next GTA game for some time. In 2024, it was decided to share the official launch date for GTA 6. Initially, that should have been the third quarter of this year, with the game getting to the market in the fall of 2025. With only a single trailer that was shared at the end of 2024, Rockstar played its cards close to the chest. However, the company managed to shock almost everyone by announcing that the game has gotten a massive delay. Instead of the original launch window, the developers opted to postpone it by nine or ten months, setting May 2026 as the new release date.
The news was received badly by the gaming community, and Take Two’s market capitalization, the parent company of Rockstar Games, plummeted by more than 10 percent on this info alone. The reason for the delay is the fact that the developers wanted to have more time to deliver the technical and content excellence that everyone is expecting. But the team also launched its second trailer right after the news of the delay, and it managed to fix nearly everything with the targeted audience. It quickly generated over 70 million views in its first 24 hours and became the most successful video game trailer of all time – it also brought about a lot of info related to the upcoming game, as well as underlining its upcoming undisputed role in the global popular culture.
Immersive, Violent, and Fun
The second trailer for GTA 6 is all about the action in the game itself. Unlike the first trailer, which showed the worldbuilding of the new game, now set in the fictional Leonida, a city and region that is very similar to real-life Florida and all of its weirdness, the new trailer showed what players can actually do in the game. And they can do a lot of stuff, apparently. Acting as likely two characters, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, players will take on the criminal world of Leonida and all of its offshoots and variations. In the clips that make up the trailer, viewers can see the plethora of characters, locations, and situations that are awaiting them in GTA 6. Here, the biggest takeaway is that, besides the expected violence and sheer fun of the game, the next Grand Theft Auto will present first and foremost a massively immersive experience. The open-world nature of the game should help in that, but it seems that Rockstar Games decided to take the very celebrated immersiveness of Red Dead Redemption 2 and take it way further.
Technical Excellence
Another big element of the second GTA 6 trailer was its underlying technical factors. As Rockstart shared, all of the footage of the trailer was captured on a regular PlayStation 5 console. Furthermore, everything in the trailer was either in-game footage or in-game cutscenes, both of which were made in the title’s RAGE engine. All of these look not just stunning, but incredibly lifelike and photorealistic, which did not hamper them in providing a very smooth audio-visual experience. This way, the Rockstar Games team showed that players should not worry about their consoles – GTA 6 should work perfectly well on both PlayStation and Xbox current console generation, and their variations.
Investment and Payoff
The investment that Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive are placing into GTA 6 is hard to fathom. With a development cycle that will last nearly a decade and hundreds of millions of USD placed into the team and their technology, the next Grand Theft Auto has to be a stellar success to repay it all. But most industry experts believe this to be nearly certain. In fact, some estimates suggest that the game will make nearly one billion USD in pre-sale orders alone. This number will be the first indicator of the game’s potential. Along with that, the sheer interest that the game managed to evoke in people is staggering. With only a few minutes of game footage on disposal, countless social media and video share profiles created millions of hours of content based on GTA 6. It might sound strange to say that GTA 6 will be the biggest game in history, but as things stand now, it seems nearly impossible for the title to become anything but that.
Pop-Culture Milestone
One way or another, GTA 6 is going to be a watershed moment for the global gaming industry. Nearly a year before the game even comes out, everyone in the gaming community is talking about it. When the game comes out, everyone in the mainstream media will talk about it. The impact of its popularity will ripple out in countless directions. Music from the artists on the game’s soundtrack will turn into big stand-alone hits. The actors in the game will become celebrities, and the merchandise that the developers sell will become iconic fashion items practically overnight. So much money will be made because of the game and around it, covering things like branding deals, content making, and much more. This does not even include the possibility of Rockstar Games turning their game into something that enables user creation, and with it, opens a whole new chapter of user-generated content. All of that makes GTA 6 a gaming milestone in the evolution of global popular culture. It also once more demonstrates just how powerful media tool video games have become, but also that the biggest products of the gaming industry are yet to come.
Author: Ivica Milaric, game designer and assistant professor of game design at the Novi Sada Academy of Arts, Republic of Serbia