GTA 6: Zelnick Begged Rockstar to Say the Delay Was a Joke

Rockstar's Jennifer Kolbe tells Bloomberg how Take-Two's CEO took GTA 6's second delay, and why he ended up backing the studio.

Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, has told Bloomberg she had to phone Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick twice to break the news of GTA 6's delays. On the second call, the one moving the game from May to November, Zelnick did not take it well at first.

Two calls, two delays

As reported by GamesRadar+, the first call was to say the game was leaving fall 2025 for a May 2026 date. The second was to say May wasn't going to work either, and that it needed to move to November.

That is the one that stung. Kolbe recalls Zelnick saying something along the lines of "You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding." Not exactly a calm response from the man signing off on the budget, but hardly a surprising one.

How it ended

The story doesn't end in a shouting match. Kolbe says that once they talked him through the reasons, Zelnick understood. She credits his reasonable nature and admits Rockstar has been lucky: plenty of executives would simply say "figure out how to ship it".

The underlying worry is a familiar one. Games pushed out too early tend to pay for it later, and not all of them recover. Kolbe describes it as something many teams go through and players have seen first-hand.

GTA 6 and what comes after

The same report includes another line: Rockstar says GTA 6 took 13 years, but GTA 7 won't. The studio argues that the tools and the team built during this project will let it work faster in future. There is no date or announcement for that game; it is a statement of intent, nothing more.

If you want to catch up on what we know so far, browse the map, the characters and the vehicles, plus everything else on the blog.

What we still don't know

The original Bloomberg interview is not part of the material we have, so the quotes come through GamesRadar+ and we haven't checked them word for word. We also don't know when the calls took place, or what specific reasons Rockstar gave Zelnick for the second delay beyond needing the extra time. If Rockstar or Take-Two add anything, we will cover it here.