Bloomberg's "Making of GTA 6" Deep Dive Reveals Why Rockstar Delayed Twice, and How the Reveal Came Together

A lengthy Bloomberg feature built on on-the-record interviews with Rockstar’s own leadership is still generating fresh detail days after it first ran, giving the clearest official picture yet of how GTA 6 slipped from a planned 2025 launch to November 19, 2026. Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, described having to call Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick twice to push the date back, first from fall 2025 to May 2026, then again to November 2026. Kolbe said Zelnick’s response to the second call was blunt disbelief before he came around once she walked him through the reasoning.

The same interview, conducted alongside Rockstar’s development leads Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker plus SVP of technology Jonathon Ashcroft, also pushed back on rumors that GTA 6’s budget had blown past the $1.5 billion it reportedly cost to build the Burj Khalifa. Kolbe did not give a real number but said that particular figure was wrong, a denial that reportedly helped lift Take-Two’s stock in the days that followed. Separately, Kolbe framed the studio’s internal culture shift as a direct response to the well documented crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2, saying leadership resolved afterward not to finish this game “by crunching” and introduced paid time off and extra compensation for overtime, while admitting the result “has not been perfect.”

Follow-up coverage building on the same Bloomberg conversation, including a report out of Germany this week, added more granular color: Rockstar’s art team reportedly grew from roughly five or six people on GTA 5 to 65 for GTA 6, and the studio’s now famous 27-minute gameplay deep dive from late August was apparently the brainchild of Rockstar marketing chief Mark Adamson, who pushed internally for a full presentation rather than a short teaser. Kolbe reportedly was one of the first people to watch an early cut of that presentation and was visibly moved by it.

None of this changes the release date or price, which remain set for November 19, 2026, but it is a rare instance of Rockstar and Take-Two executives speaking candidly and at length about the internal mechanics of a famously secretive studio so close to launch.