Zelnick Says GTA 6's Delay Was a "Must-Have" and Calls Piracy "A Fact of Life"

Strauss Zelnick said the decision to give Rockstar Games more time on GTA 6 was "not a nice-to-have" but "a must-have", and called piracy "a fact of life" for every entertainment business he has worked in. The Take-Two chief executive was speaking at the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech: California conference in Napa Valley on November 4, and outlets published his remarks on November 5 and 6.

He gave no new detail about GTA 6 itself: no budget, no pre-order count and no sales forecast. The same session produced his answer on AI and on Take-Two's other franchises.

Why Take-Two agreed to delay GTA 6 again

The request for more time came from Rockstar 10 days after a Take-Two board retreat, in GTA BOOM's account of the session, and Zelnick said he agreed to it because the alternative was at odds with what the company says it stands for. "This was not a nice-to-have. This was a must-have," he said, adding that "culture, like character, is tested in the breach".

He put the argument against shipping on schedule in terms of another publisher. "I'm not going to throw any competitors under the bus, but if you know anything about the video game business, in the past few years, there was a very high-profile release that fell into this category, and they shipped, and they had to pull the title after shipping because it didn't work," he said, in quotes published by Dexerto, which read the remark as a reference to Cyberpunk 2077. Zelnick did not name the game or the company.

It is a line he has used before. Take-Two has "never regretted" slipping a date, he told investors earlier, and competitors that needed more polish and shipped anyway "did so at their peril", TheGamer reported.

Piracy "a fact of life", with lawyers in reserve

Asked about piracy two weeks before the biggest launch his company has ever run, Zelnick answered with numbers from his years in film and music. "Piracy is a fact of life. I've been in every entertainment business there is, and when I was in the movie business, we figured 10-20% at any given time," he said. "In the record business, because I was in the record business from 1994 to 2000, by the mid 2000s, I would argue that 80% of that market was pirated; now that's way back down again." The quotes were published by PC Gamer and reported by Notebookcheck.

Games, he argued, are harder to copy than a film or a song. "Because of the file sizes and the complexity, piracy is less of an issue in interactive entertainment, but it's not been a non-issue," he said, in quotes carried by VGTimes, which also notes his point that modern games expect a connection to the publisher's servers. GTA 6 is a 212GB download at launch.

If it does become a problem, the answer is the ordinary one. "In the event that it turns into an issue, we address it the same way every other business does, which is with legal work, and then with technical work, and we'll have to do both," he said.

What is still unknown

Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has said what copy protection GTA 6 ships with, and Zelnick named no measure that is already in place. Take-Two reports its second-quarter results on November 9. GTA 6 launches on November 19, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.