GTA 6 UK release date rumours and news: Everything we know so far

GTA 6 is still little more than a name floating in the wind, but it appears Rockstar has some large shoes to fill when it finally reveals details about the highly-anticipated open-world game.

We already knew GTA V was popular – earning a reported billion dollars in its first week – but now the game has achieved a staggering new achievement; it’s become the most profitable entertainment product of all time. 

According to reports, to date, GTA V has sold 90 million copies across Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and PC and, despite the odd drop in price thanks to online sales, it has managed to consistently sell at its original price. All of this was further bolstered by the popularity of GTA Online. This has reportedly earned developers Rockstar $6 billion, from a budget of just $265 million. To put this into perspective, the film Avatar, which holds the record for the highest grossing film of all time, made around half this amount. 

It’s no surprise, then, that Rockstar wants to follow this success with another instalment, GTA 6. No concrete details are yet known about the game, and with Red Dead Redemption 2 coming out in October 2018, its very unlikely we’ll hear anything before that, but signs have begun to emerge that work is underway. Based on a sparse amount of detail, here’s what we know so far about GTA 6.

GTA 6 release date

There was a four-year gap between GTA: San Andreas and GTA 4, and a five-year gap between GTA 4 and GTA 5. Using that pattern as a rough yardstick, a GTA 6 release date should land in 2018. Realistically, though, it won’t. Rockstar almost definitely won’t want to push one massive open-world game within months of another, and with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 this October we can expect a wide berth before GTA 6.

How wide? It could be three or four years. Games industry analyst Michael Pachter spoke to Gamingbolt about the future of Grand Theft Auto, and said he doesn’t see a sequel launching for a while.

“I say it comes out after 2022,” Pachter told the site. “Remember, Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out eight years after the first one- so the idea that GTA 6 comes out before 2021 seems ridiculous. And Rockstar, the only announcements they’ve ever made more than a year before launch was because the launch itself was delayed. So best case, GTA 6 gets announced in 2020 for a 2021 release.”

We’d wager that there’d be a gap of at least two years between RDR2 and GTA 6, which places a launch around 2020. We could see something in the way of a trailer before that, however.

Yibada reported on speculation that GTA 6 could even depart American shores in favour of London. Now there’s nothing in the way of actual evidence for this, although several outlets have echoed the speculation. While a London-based return would be brilliant, the GTA atmosphere is very much entwined with its satirical version of the US. Moving location would involve a core shift in tone, let alone car models and fake brands.

Throwing more water on the GTA: London fire is a 2013 Guardian interview with Rockstar’s Dan Houser: “I think for us, my gut feeling is, GTA London was cool for the time, but games were more limited then,” said Houser. “These days I think we would love to set a game in the UK, set in London, whatever, but I don’t know if it would be a GTA game. I think there are plenty of great stories we could tell about the UK, great environments to showcase, great gameplay mechanics that could have a UK bent to them – I just don’t think it would be a GTA necessarily.”

That said, it doesn’t hurt to imagine a new GTA: London – hopefully more Luther than Notting Hill.

Other rumours claim Rockstar is making a replica of the entire US, squished down to fit in a single map. A similar technique was taken by driving game The Crew, which offered a condensed simulacra of the US that could be crossed in around an hour. GTA 5 was vast, but a game that offered a network of country-spanning cities would be on a different scale. There’s no clear evidence for this, however, so take it with a handful of salt.