Boss of GTA 6 and Borderlands 4 Owner Take-Two Says It Will Time Its Releases ‘To Respect the Consumer’s Need to Spend a Lot of Time Playing These Hit Games Before They Go on to the Next’

Borderlands 4 now has a firm September 23, 2025 release date, as confirmed during Sony’s State of Play 2025 broadcast. But where does that leave Grand Theft Auto 6?

Last week, Rockstar parent company Take-Two reiterated GTA 6’s fall 2025 release window, but now we know Borderlands 4 is out in September, there’s no chance GTA 6 will be out the same month.

So when? October? November? December 2025? All seem up for grabs now for GTA 6. The risk of course is that Take-Two ends up cannibalizing its big 2025 games by releasing them too close together. And let’s not forget Mafia: The Old Country launches at some point summer 2025.

Could Take-Two’s big games, and by that we really mean GTA 6, end up doing more harm to each other than good by releasing too close to each other? That’s a question we put to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick in an interview ahead of the company’s third quarter financial results. As you’d expect, Zelnick said Take-Two is planning its releases to avoid a risk of cannibalization, insisting the timing is driven by a desire to “respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”

“No, I think we will plan the releases so as not to have that be a problem,” Zelnick said. “And what we found is when you’re giving consumers hits, they tend to be interested in pursuing other hits. In other words, I’ve said this many times, even when the hits aren’t ours, they’re a good thing for the industry. In this case, we hope that the hits will largely be ours. So we feel really good about it and I think that we will time our releases so as to respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”

In the context of Borderlands 4’s just-announced September release date, when might GTA 6 come out? If Take-Two wants Borderlands 4 fans to spent “a lot of time” playing before moving on to, say, GTA 6, how long is a lot of time? One month? Two months? Three?

Amid all this speculation is of course the prospect that GTA 6 will be delayed either into early winter, or at some point in the first quarter of 2026.

“Look, there’s always a risk of slippage and I think as soon as you say words like absolutely, you jinx things,” Zelnick responded when IGN asked how confident he was that Rockstar would hit fall 2025 for GTA 6. “So we feel really good about it.”

On Borderlands 4, Zelnick insisted the brand remains “really strong” despite the disastrous Borderlands movie, which bombed at the box office and was mauled by critics and fans alike. In fact, Zelnick said that the movie’s failure won’t impact the potential success of Borderlands 4 at all.

“It’s no secret that the movie was a disappointment, but interestingly, it really benefited our catalog sales,” Zelnick explained. “So actually the effect was quite positive. It would’ve assumed been more positive if the movie had been better received. But the brand is really strong. We feel great about Borderlands 4.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.