Let the countdown to GTA VI begin

This is it, then: the most important video game of this decade – surely in terms of hype and commercial potential – will finally find its way to over 130 million home consoles ready to run it in a few hours. Grand Theft Auto VI will be out on November 19th for the PlayStation5, PlayStation5 Pro, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S at $79.99/$99.99 (Standard and Ultimate editions respectively), available in Sony’s and Microsoft’s digital storefronts only.

As previously confirmed, there won’t be a disc version of the game at launch – maybe ever… but it remains to be seen – and boxed editions of it sold in brick-and-mortar stores will only contain a download code to use in the PlayStation Store or the Microsoft Store.

The game has been available to buy for months – preorders are reportedly going very well already – but consumers interested in playing it on launch day now have a specific time to keep in mind: today, midnight local time. That’s when Rockstar will allow players to start preloading GTA VI onto their consoles in order to beat the November 19th rush (and the company to avoid what happened last year with Hollow Knight: Silksong). Come that day, they’ll be able to simply activate it and start playing the moment the title is unlocked.

The game requires up to 212GB (!) of storage, so players will obviously need to have that space available for it and let their consoles download it over several hours (in case they don’t use very fast home Internet connections or servers are overloaded anyway or both). A small price to pay, all things considered, to play what is shaping up to be one of the most highly anticipated titles in the history of video games.

A road to release paved with delays, unorthodox choices and controversy

It’s worth noting, though, that while the excitement around GTA VI is palpable, so is doubt – even a certain amount of criticism towards Rockstar and the way it handled the game’s development and promotion so far. More than a decade in the making, the latest GTA was officially revealed all the way back in 2023, it got delayed, it got delayed again and wasn’t even a sure thing for November 2026 at the beginning of this year. Situations like this are usually cause for concern, but Rockstar’s track record and focus on quality have earned gamers’ patience, as consumer interest in the title does not seems to have waned through all of that.

Development difficulties aside, Rockstar and Take2 have also made a few rather controversial decisions. The base game costs $79.99 (already $10 more expensive than what typically console games go for) and its Ultimate edition costs $99.99 (but the extra content is so extensive that many gamers essentially consider that one to be the “full game”). More to the point, this is Take2’s digital-only pricing for the title, which did not sit well with a lot of consumers at first – especially since, a few days later, Sony announced it’s moving away from physical editions of PlayStation games in general.

The excitement built around the game is so high right now that nobody seriously expects a lot of people to not play it just because it does not come on disc at launch. As a AAA title closer to PlayStation systems than to Xbox ones, the new GTA was even targeted by the “No disc, No game” online commenters over the summer, but that’s largely over now: this is a Sony matter, after all, not a developer or publisher one.

For better or worse, it does not seem like Take2 will lose a whole lot of sales by going digital-only with GTA VI at launch. It will make the most amount of money possible instead – which was obviously the reason behind that choice in the first place, whether we all like it or not.

The paradox of an-already megahit that’s largely unknown

Development hurdles, unconventional pricing, questionable publisher choices and unforeseen troubles – like the Cyberleek situation which briefly threatened to seriously spoil things for the game – are not the main reason why GTA VI has proven to be a controversial title leading up to its release. No. The main reason is Rockstar’s insistence on following a highly unorthodox approach in terms of how this game is presented and covered – even up until now, just a few days away from reaching consumers.

Where to begin? Three brief trailers in the span of three years – and one “extended look” streamed on Netflix first – all highly edited, all deprived of direct gameplay footage of any meaningful duration, all nothing like what the game will look like most of the time when played. A lot of screenshots also not indicative of how GTA VI looks like in actual gameplay – essentially what we once used to call bullshots to illustrate the difference between what is basically Photo Mode material and what a game’s clean, in-game screenshots normally depict.

Added to these is the tightly controlled dripping of cherry-picked information about the game to a small number of carefully selected media, the extremely late lifting of the reviews embargo – currently rumored to be November 18th, a mere day before the game’s release – and the total absence of any reference to gameplay features in the official website of the title. All we ever get there is some background information about a few characters and places, the aforementioned Photo Mode-style screenshots and music tidbits. At this point, it’s hard not to think that not only is Rockstar putting in a lot of effort to hide as much of GTA VI as it possibly can, but it’s doing its best to hide something specific and truly important about the game.

Which begs the question: what exactly is it that Rockstar is trying so hard to hide? After watching the company follow this unorthodox approach for three years now – noticing things here and there while admittedly remaining in the dark as much as anyone else – yours truly can only give two possible answers. One: Rockstar has crafted an extremely complex story and built a number of new gameplay systems that does not want players to know anything about before playing GTA VI. Two: Rockstar has spent a decade developing just another typical GTA experience – visually upgraded and enriched by certain RDR2 elements – and it simply doesn’t want consumers to be aware of that fact before launch.

As of right now, a single day before gamers will be able to preload Grand Theft Auto VI onto their PlayStation or Xbox consoles, it looks like things could go either way. It could be that Rockstar has managed the unthinkable – to keep the most important things about GTA VI a secret for a decade, right up until launch – or it could be that it just managed to take millions upon millions of consumers for a ride, selling them essentially the same interactive entertainment experience as before for a third time in a row. Die-hard Rockstar fans wouldn’t mind a visually stunning new GTA that’s barely different enough to justify its existence, but for everyone else that would be ten years of patience without much of a payoff.

As is often the case, this isn’t an either/or situation. What we may end up getting on November 19th is another familiar Grand Theft Auto experience that’s technically astonishing, that’s introducing just enough new gameplay mechanics to be interesting to both GTA veterans and newcomers, that’s well-written, well-directed and well-presented on every level – just not groundbreaking or innovative in any way that’s significant or even noteworthy. Would that be ideal? No. Would that be enough to print a lot of money? Yes. Would that matter? Yes and no, depending who you ask. In any case, not long before we all find out: ten days to go. Let the countdown…

(realizes this outro works exactly how Rockstar’s playbook intended)

…to GTA VI begin. Damn you, Rockstar!