Zelnick says he doesn't regret the GTA 6 delays, and we all know which launch he's thinking about

PC Gamer picked up some comments from Zelnick about the GTA 6 delays and whether he regrets pushing the game back. Short version: he doesn't. His reasoning is that shipping a game before it's ready almost never works out, and he pointed at one unnamed "very high profile release" that fell into that trap. He didn't say the name. He didn't have to.

Come on. Everybody in this community has been making the same joke for years at this point. A massive, hyped, long-awaited open world game that launched in a rough state and got dragged for it. If you've been on this forum for five minutes you already know what he's gesturing at.

the logic is hard to argue with

I've been annoyed about the waits as much as anyone. But a broken launch is the kind of thing a game never fully lives down, no matter how many patches get pumped out afterward. The reputation sticks. Rockstar knows that better than most, and Take-Two clearly does too.

We're three weeks out from November 19 now, and the thing is actually finished. Pre-orders have been open since June. There's a physical map in the box. Preload starts in a few days. Compared to where we were two years ago, this all feels weirdly calm, and I think that's the point Zelnick is making.

Shipping an unfinished game rarely ends well. There was a very high profile release that fell into this category.

That's the quote in spirit, anyway. No names, no shots fired directly. Just a CEO saying out loud what everybody already suspected about why this thing kept slipping.

does it actually make the wait feel better?

Honestly, kind of? I'd rather wait and get something polished than get it early and spend six months reading patch notes. The delays were brutal to live through, but the reasoning holds up. Plenty of people will still say they'd have taken the game a year ago regardless. Fair enough.

What I want to know is whether Zelnick's little unnamed jab lands the way he thinks it does, or if people just roll their eyes at it at this point. Where do you land on the delays now that we're basically at the finish line?

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Source: PC Gamer · Curated content.