Summary
- Insiders suggest Grand Theft Auto VI could be the first “AAAAA” game due to its massive scope
- Its cultural impact is causing other developers to delay releases to avoid competition
- The game’s influence is so large it’s seen as a “black cloud” looming over nearly every other genre
Grand Theft Auto VI could be the first ever AAAAA game in history.
Devolver Digital co-founder Nigel Lowrie told IGN that the “scope and scale” of the Rockstar Games title is larger than anything in the gaming industry. “I mean, there are AAA games and then there’s AAAA games and I’d argue that Grand Theft Auto is potentially the AAAAA game, it’s just bigger than anything else both in the scope and scale of the game and the kind of cultural impact that it has and the attention it demands,” he said.
Gamesight CEO Adam Lieb agreed, “I would say that GTA for the last year and a half has been a part of almost every conversation around launch dates I have heard.”
The gaming CEO added that the “GTA VI effect” influences other video game titles that aren’t even in the same genre as GTA. “What’s funny with GTA is, because we do a lot of genre analysis comparisons because of the RP servers, there ends up being almost every type [of game]. Someone’s built a horror GTA RP server or whatever, so that competes with Silent Hill somehow,” Lieb shared.
“And you obviously take that with a little bit of grain of salt, but the scope of that game is so large that it ends up competing with stuff that it otherwise wouldn’t,” he continued. “Almost every other game, if you’re a shooter, you don’t care a lot about other things besides shooters. There are some things you maybe should be slightly cognizant of, but generally if you’re a FPS, that’s the genre you care about. But GTA has been this little bit of a black cloud that looms kind of over everything. So, that, I think, has caused people to be more hesitant with dates.”
GTA VI was initially scheduled to release in Fall 2025 but was delayed to May 26, 2026. A developer working on a “big multiplayer game” previously told Bloomberg that they delayed the release of their project from Fall 2025 to Spring 2026. Although the postponement was due to the game needing more time, they also stated that they pushed their release to avoid being outshined by GTA VI.
