GTA 6 pre-orders were rumored to go live today, May 18, but it looks like those reports were inaccurate.
Last week, GTA 6 fans lost their collective mind after reports emerged that Best Buy had potentially leaked the game’s pre-order date. During a livestream, YouTuber Frogboyx1gaming appeared to receive an email from Best Buy to his affiliate account signalling a pre-order campaign for GTA 6 that would run from May 18-21. The suggestion was that GTA 6 pre-orders would go live on May 18, potentially alongside GTA 6 Trailer 3.
IGN had asked Best Buy for comment but received no response. Still, there was plenty of doubt cast on the rumor, and, as we pointed out last week, we’d been here before, many times. Some GTA 6 fans actually believed in a Trailer 3 release date prediction that came from someone who charted the planetary positions for every single Rockstar Games trailer released since 2007. That turned out to be inaccurate, too.
Now, the main administrator of GTA Forums has posted to say a verified source at a European distribution company “confirmed there’s no pre-orders,” insisting Best Buy had made a mistake.
As you’d expect, the GTA 6 fan community, already close to breaking point waiting for some sort of announcement or reveal for the game, has gone into meltdown — and yes, there are a number of angry posts from people who had come to expect pre-orders would go live today, despite the fact there was no official announcement that Rockstar.
The upshot of all this is that the wait goes on not just for GTA 6 pre-orders to go live, but a fresh look at the game, either in trailer or screenshot form. We still don’t know how much the game will cost. All we have to go on are rather vague comments from Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, who’s talked about GTA 6 marketing kicking off this summer, and the game itself offering incredible value whenever anyone asks him how much GTA 6 will cost.
Certainly, the wait for a new GTA 6 reveal has gone on longer than anyone expected. It’s been over a year since Trailer 2 came out. Trailer 1 came out three years ago, in 2023. Meanwhile, GTA 6 itself has suffered two official delays, first to May 2026 after it was penciled in for fall 2025, then to November 2026. In a new interview, Zelnick suggested GTA 6 was internally targeting an even earlier release window — around spring 2025 — before it was announced for fall 2025.
GTA 6 is significantly behind schedule, then, but Zelnick has gone on the record to say he’s keen to give developer Rockstar everything it needs to achieve “perfection.” And there is of course pressure on the game to deliver just that and break every sales record going.
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Take-Two is estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far on GTA 6. In an interview with the publication, Zelnick wouldn’t say how much exactly, but did admit “it was expensive.” To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie’s recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter’s life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.
At least Zelnick sounds really, really confident that GTA 6 won’t be delayed yet again and will actually come out on November 19. When he was asked how he deals with not knowing when the game will come out, given his commitment to giving the developers all the time they need, he replied, firmly: “November 19th, I do know. It’s been announced.”
We’re now just six months from that date.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
