GTA 6 Delay: Former Roblox Creative Director Says “You Don’t Add an Entire Extra Year to Your Original Target Date for “Polish”

GTA 6 got delayed to late 2027 and not everyone in the gaming industry is buying the official explanation from Rockstar Games. In a recent LinkedIn post, Sterling R., a veteran technical animator and former Roblox Creative Director with 25 years of experience in game development, shared his frustration over the delay, calling it “devastating news” and suggesting deeper production issues behind the scenes.

From the start the premise of this game has made no sense,” Sterling wrote. “It’s a $100+, M-rated, UGC game. None of that fits together. The entire production has reeked of corporate greed from the very outset, and the huge delays confirm my theory now, sadly.

Sterling then went on to express is skepticism of Rockstar’s official justification that the delay is due to the team needing more time to polish.

They are trying to perfect GTA VI and need more time for polish,” he wrote. “You don’t add an entire extra year to your original target date for ‘polish’. That’s just a busted game and really bad planning quite honestly.

Grand Theft Auto 6 was expected to release in Fall of 2026 but got pushed to May 2026. On November 6/7 2025, Rockstar & parent publisher Take‑Two Interactive announced a second delay: the game is now scheduled for November 19, 2026.

Rockstar’s public statement:

We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.

In a post Cyberpunk 2077 world, a delay is not a bad thing, and Rockstar Games has never been in a rush to release GTA 6; since GTA 5 still makes hundreds of millions a year.

According to David Bethune, an Ex- IBM turned Game Developer, the delay could be linked to a “massive feature-creep / scope changes, or something that never worked from the beginning and they went ahead with it anyway.”

Another side of this story is the recent firings at Rockstar Games. The studio reportedly fired 30–40 developers across its UK and Canada offices. The union involved is the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). They say the terminated employees were part of a private Discord channel organizing union activity.

However, according to Rockstar Games the firings were due to “distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum” and were “in no way related to people’s right to join a union or engage in union activities.”

Regardless of what the truth is, the morale at Rockstar is reportedly at an all-time low and that is right in the middle of the most important development cycle of Rockstar Games.

How much will this impact GTA 6 development remains to be seen, and could we see further delays?