How GTA6 is a hyper example of what is happening in the games industry

The hype around GTA6 has caused many games to move out of its way. This is a good example of what happens all the time in the gaming industry but on a much larger and magnified scale

It happened last year and now it has happened once again this year as soon as GTA6 was delayed and a new released date was announced. Pretty much every game has vacated the time around GTA6’s release date in a event reminiscent of Mosses parting the Red Sea. There are basically no games coming out around the 19th November 2026 or for the couple of months that follow and games are pilling up in the space just prior to its release like a traffic jam on the motorway. Last year games released early and moved their release date as soon as there was a hint that GTA6 was coming, while others held fast for a more definitive GTA6 release date that never came. Then there was an audible sigh heard all around the world when the announcement came that GTA6 had been delayed for a year.

This situation is going to cause a huge problem towards the end of the year. There are now so many games coming out in the months leading up to November it has caused a press for attention from gamers. These are not small games either. Ace Combat, Rayman, Gears of War E-Day, Galactic Racer, Valor Mortis, Castlevania, , Final Fantasy Resonance, and Phantom Blade Zero release in October alone. There is the full releases of Valheim and Enshrouded, as well as a unspecified October release date for No Rest for the Wicked in the lead up to GTA6’s release as well. There are also a plethora of games nearing release with no announced release date as of yet. There is a new mainline Call of Duty game releasing in October but I think this will have little effected in the long run on COD games sales. It may suffer from initial sales losses to GTA6 but people who always buy COD will buy it in the end, but in the end, who knows.

Release Calendar for August 2026 through to February 2027

And then in November we have GTA6, along with a new Barbie game to compete with it, probably the one game that isn’t worried about sales overlap as I doubt many Barbie fans will play GTA6 but you never know and who am I to yuk anyone’s yum. I feel the Barbie devs are quite smug about their position, as they are pretty much one of the only games that can stand toe to toe with GTA6 and not be effected and really should be using it as a marketing ploy. But even after GTA6’s release, there is only one game of note in December and 4 over January and February.

Essentially this traffic jam of games is going to end in a car crash for many of these developers, no matter how big they are. They cannot afford to delay their game for too long, and they cannot afford to release too early, especially if it means releasing a unfinished, buggy game, as we all know the consequences of that from past Cyberpunk 2077 experiences. As we know, game budgets have ballooned over the last 5-10yrs and almost all studios (aside from RockStar apparently) can afford to delay their game for any amount of time. GTA6 has created a hole in the gaming space, not only for marketing and hype but for actual gaming time and spending power. Many people are buying less games. Majority of gamers (about 40%) buy a game once every 3-6months and many (around 33%) buy less than one a year. This means that if they are buying GTA6 this will be their budget for either the three to six months or even a year surrounding GTA6. I realise this is reductive as life doesn’t work like on a spreadsheet and GTA6 is an anomaly (the first real AAAA game??) therefore this may fall outside of these norms as the hype, FOMO, and zeitgeist surrounding this game is insane.

Now many people are speaking about this and I don’t really have anything to add but rather I noted how this is just a hyper example of what happens all the time in the gaming industry. Below is a reaction to a video by Bellular News about the releases around GTA6. It is a good video as it has two perspectives, the original as well as an industry veteran’s take. I have also added the original video in case anyone wants to watch it without pauses. I would like to know as a side note, how does the the Building Better Games channel not have more people subscribed to it? He has a lot of really interesting videos about the gaming industry and deep insights into where it goes wrong.

What interested me though, was the amount of AAA games that have moved their release date to accommodate GTA6 and how I think this is a replication of what AA and indie games do on a regular basis. There are some AAA games that need to do to this as well from time to time but with a significant less frequency. The issue that has come up here is the studios that are normally used to bullying their way through other games and indie studios, have had a taste of their own medicine, and they don’t like it.

There are going to be many of these games that ‘fail’ because of this crush and as a direct result of GTA6 as they cannot afford to be in direct competition with it. If I look across those three months leading up to GTA6’s release there are nine games I am interested in as well as three games I already own that are exiting early access (about time Valheim!) So if I were to buy every game it would cost me £460 (I took a few liberties here as Phantom Blade Zero and Valor Mortis do not have a sales price as of yet so I made the assumption they will be in the region of £50.) You can add a futher £75 in if I didn’t already own Valheim, No Rest for the Wicked and Enshrouded. £500 used be the price of a console and is a huge amount of money especially if I was to add the £70 for GTA6 on top of that (although this is really £90 as the Ultimate Edition has blocked off missions and story beats not present in the base game.) There are only a few people who can afford that. These are only the games I am interested in mind you, it doesn’t include Marvel Tokon, Madden, Metal Gear Solid 2 collection, Wolverine, Silent Hill, Rayman, Ace Combat and so on. There are 28 games in three months that make the list of bigger games and doesn’t include smaller indies and Switch games. I would like to point out I excluded any Switch releases as I think the Switch, and Nintendo in general, are outside the influence of the general gaming sphere, if you have a Switch you will buy games that are on there.

There was already a significant financial pressure for gamers, and with gaming hardware and everything in general increasing in price, game sales are already pushed to the limit. GTA6 will sell gangbusters at launch (estimates are anywhere from 12mil to 35mil pre-orders that possibly was also effected by PlayStations and RockStar no disc policy) and this will still have a direct impact on sales of other games irrespective of genre or platform.

GTA6 has also sucked up all of the attention and media focus in the gaming world ever since it was announced and a date for release was set. I personally have no interest in the game (it is also console exclusive so as a PC gamer I do not have access to the game at launch) and have not been a fan of RockStar’s game in the recent past. GTA5 and Red Dead 2 were really not my cup of tea for various reasons. Currently the other releases are fighting tooth and nail for any attention or media space they can get. Many of these games are games people have been looking forward to over the years with many of them having been in development for years and would be sure thing to at least sell very well if GTA was not on the bill for this year. The point is that if you are a keen gamer you probably already know about these other games, but for the casual gamer who might say have bought Ace Combat or Valor Mortis is instead steely focussed on GTA6 even if it is not in their normal game genre, there is no space left in the conversation for these other games. The intense media attention and social media hype has created a cultural phenomenon, and looking at the effect this overblown attention had on games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, it is easy to see how people who would normally have passed on GTA6, are now enthralled along with everyone else. Baldur’s Gate 3 pulled people from all forms of gaming and created a mad hysteria that resulted in increased sales, especially when people realised how good the game was, even if they never played another game like in again. Cyberpunk had a similar effect but was marred by the disastrous launch of the game but benefitted once again when the they updated the game and it redeemed themselves. GTA6 is on another level from this. If any of these games when they are released, and especially if they were released simultaneously with GTA6, turn out to be a 7, 8 or 9 out of 10, they will never be deemed to be good enough. Smaller tighter games with limited scope and more curated design, the very thing people keep asking for, will be seen as inferior to GAT6. I feel it has generated so much hype and mass hysteria that it will be difficult for the game to be seen as a failure. This is probably a self fulfilling prophesy.

Many of these other studios have been delt a bad hand by this release and for ending up in the wake of a game as generation defining as GTA6. There will be layoffs, studio closure and the knock on effects of this will last for a while. Even long anticipated games releasing in January and February, such as Fable, P4R and Stranger than Heaven, will still be caught in the aftershock of the release and will have to deal with being, often unfairly, compared to GTA. Unless GTA’s release is an absolute disaster, a highly unlikely situation, games will be compared to the ‘feeling’ that GTA gave people.

The point I have been trying to make is this is an example of the everyday for most of the games industry. The amount of games released every year is staggering (20K on Steam alone last year) and leads to exactly this situation but the concertina effect of the games moving out of GTA’s way has magnified the effect. A Wolverine release in September will have a knock on effect for every other game around due to it’s hype and gravitas. All around the release of Control Resonant is ‘smaller’ games that are unfairly competing for the attention of gamers and often the crumbs of sales left behind. There has been an increased amount of pressure on games that release to be the 9 or 10 out of 10 and a game as such as Valor Mortis will not necessarily have the pull and interest that a new Gears of War or God of War has for instance.

An example is a couple of Obsidian games that have released recently. The last three or four games they have released (Pentimant, Outer Worlds and Avowed) were all good games, not amazing games, but good solid 7/10 games. They were fun games with interesting stories and gameplay, but they did not sell as well as XBOX would have liked but had comparatively lower budgets when compared to games that released at the same time. We can discuss the Game Pass effect at some other point but as a factor of success, XBOX would have taken this into account (hopefully!) The two Outer Worlds games both had similar experiences. The first one was a great success with 4mil copies sold with a smaller budget, the second one had a larger budget and it’s success needs to be viewed on the basis of day one Game Pass figure as above. Ignoring the Game Pass effect, how would these games have compare to other games that release? How many of these other games cannibalise each others sales purely based on simultaneous releases?

The release of GTA6 has pushed this effect of supply vs demand into overdrive. The issue we have seen over the last few years has been magnified by the fact that the usual suspects who in the past have been the cause of this effect to other games that release in their window, are instead included with these games by the release of a behemoth.

The games industry either needs to release less games or find a way to ensure more people buy games. Period. All other suggestions on how to fix the industry that I see are plaster or symptoms of this issue. The free to play and Games as a Service model has increased the number of gamers, giving an inflated sense of the health of the gaming industry. More people mean more games but if those people are not customers who buy games, but would rather play ROBLOX or Fortnite, then it leads to a false economy of scale. From what I can see the number of actual gamers who buy games has not increased by nearly the amount needed in order to justify or maintain the number of games released. The quality of games released is subjective by nature, but with the increase in games being released comes an increase in the number of ‘quality’ games. The ratio of games on the quality scale did not increase but the quantity of the games that are on that scale has. So in 1980 there may have been 2-3 games that were at the top of the list per year, but as the number of games released increased so did that number of quality games, but the quantity of customers buying those games did not increase enough to buy all of the games nor cover the increase in budget these games require. I would be interested in Mat Piscatella and other analysts comparing the number of games bought a year per person to say 1980, 1990 and all the decades leading up to the 2020s. I would imagine that there would not be a significant increase in these numbers. Add to this the fact that younger gamers are not buying games or gaming hardware and you have a runaway train heading for a cliff.

The gaming industry seems to have very little interest in fixing itself or very little idea on how to do it, even though the incentive for them to do so is there. They plough on with the same design and method they have for years because it works some of the time. What we want as (G)amers is not something they are able to offer, especially if there are not enough people to support the product they are trying to make. The ‘make better games’ argument is redundant as in order to do that they need to increase budgets and staff and by proxy price, but of course if they do that they cannot find sufficient customers to buy the game as those people are either not buying their game in favour of another, or are buying their game in place of another. AA and indie cheaper games are all well and good, and would help with the ability of customers to purchase more games, but people do not always buy these games in sufficient numbers to sustain these studios. Would people buy an Outer Worlds and Valor Mortis as opposed to one £70 AAA game? Would they buy a No Rest for the Wicked and a Silksong in place of GTA6? I am not so sure. A reduction in games or a increase in gamers is the only sure fire way to ensure the industry can sustain itself. This is the lesson that GTA6s release should be teaching the gaming industry but instead we all wring our hands and clutch our pearls and bemoan the state of the industry.