As Grand Theft Auto 6’s November 19 launch date looms in the distance, the games industry is bending over backwards to get out of its way. Per Dead Space creator and Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield, Rockstar’s plans to delay the game (which was pushed back from a May 2026 release date last year) have upended the launch plans of many other studios, from those working on indie games to other AAA titles.
“With all this money that came in [during the pandemic], you now have too many AAA games [coming out] at Christmas, as opposed to a few plus something from Nintendo,” Schofield said in a recent interview with gamesindustry.biz. “There are no new people in the market, so if there are too many games out at once, they’re gonna fail. And so everyone tries to get out of the blast radius of any big game.”
Schofield definitely has a point, although the delay has certainly worked in the favor of other games, with Lego Batman: The Legacy of the Dark Knight production director Jonathan Smith saying the team at TT Games is “really glad to have some space” to show off the game without being overshadowed by a juggernaut like GTA 6. But for studios currently working on a project slated for an end-of-year release, this is a nightmare. Even Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has said he can’t imagine any adult choosing not to play GTA 6.
“You don’t wanna be near it,” Schofield said of GTA 6’s launch window. “Yes, it’s gonna bring people back [to gaming], and I think that’s great for the industry, but not many other games are gonna be sold. It’s the same way when Call of Duty comes out, everyone gives it a couple of weeks. You just can’t ship that many games at the same time.”
He’s not wrong–in 2016, Titanfall 2’s launch was sandwiched between the release Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. As beloved as Titanfall 2 was, it couldn’t compete with the player count of two massive, long-running running FPS franchises, and was ultimately left to rot and largely abandoned once Electronic Arts’ spin-off battle royale, Apex Legends, gained popularity in 2019.
Schofield added that he’d like to see more games come out during different times of the year, citing the month of October and the entirety of summer as good times to release a game without having to compete with a titan. (Though, ironically, Titanfall 2 did come out in October.) But it’s not just timing that matters–according to Schofield, shipping a successful game is a matter of doing everything perfectly, from hiring to marketing and everything in between.
“To make any game that’s a hit–and there are only so many a year–you have to get everything right, and I mean everything,” he explained. “You have to have a good story. Then you need to put a passionate crew together, some seasoned veterans in there along with highly talented people right out of school. And then you need a great marketing campaign by a great marketing team, with a company that’s behind you and trusts you. You need good leadership. Everything and everyone has to come together.”
But Schofield does have some interesting opinions on artists, especially those who want to work in the games industry.
“I wish artists would take notice that this is a great time to learn some form of AI,” he said. “In five years, people will be coming out of school who know AI, while artists sit back saying, ‘I’m not doing it’. People said the same thing about performance capture and motion capture. I even had a couple of people quit because they were against it, which is the same thing I’m hearing now [about AI]. They say it steals artists’ work. Too late! It’s out there now.”
Schofield–who is a huge fan of AI image generator Midjourney–says many companies see AI as a cost-saver, but he sees it as a time-saver that will lead to more creativity and more in-game content.”
“That’s what [AI companies] are making, tools to make my characters faster and animation better and all that,” Schofield explained. “I’d like to see the integration of all of it, hopefully within one of the big engines. That’s a lot of work, to integrate all these freaking tools that are going on. And these tools, will they make us more creative? Yes, in some ways they will. But do you think the animators are now gonna go home after four hours because their job is faster? No! We’re gonna be putting more and more stuff into these games, because we have more time.”
Though he didn’t voice any worries about AI’s impact on the environment–and handwaived concerns about stealing work from humans–Schofield did express concern over how much the AI tools he desperately wants might cost.
“I’m a game-maker, not a tool-maker,” he said. “So I’m gonna buy the [AI] tools or rent them, or it’s gonna be a subscription. Do you think they’re gonna give away the tools for free? No freaking way! They’re gonna be freaking expensive. Everyone is gonna want their money back, and they know they have a short window to get it back because some of these AI companies are gonna fail. And then we’re gonna need to hire AI people to implement everything, and they’re gonna be expensive too.”
