By Zaheer Kachwala<\/p>\n
(Reuters) -Repeated delays of “Grand Theft Auto VI” have failed to perturb analysts, who believe the \u200bnew release window will allow Take-Two Interactive to make a bigger splash \u200cwhen it launches the videogame industry’s highly anticipated title next year.<\/p>\n
The videogame publisher pushed the title to \u200cNovember 19 next year from its earlier release date of May 26, marking a second public delay for the videogame and sending the company’s shares 5% lower in premarket trading on Friday.<\/p>\n
The delay left fans and investors disappointed, but analysts believe \u2060it positions “GTA VI” \u200cto benefit from the holiday-season surge in spending, with the game expected to rake in billions of dollars within the first \u200dfew weeks of release.<\/p>\n
“Releasing it closer to the holiday season allows for more opportunities to bundle with the tail end of current-gen consoles, making it more valuable to \u200bTake-Two because of the marketing dollars the console makers will be willing to \u200cinvest,” said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.<\/p>\n
The delay would also not lead to an overall cut in annual sales forecasts for Take-Two’s upcoming financial years, as bookings projections would only get shifted around. Jefferies said the brokerage will “simply shift our estimates forward 2 \u2060quarters.”<\/p>\n
Delays have become commonplace in the videogame \u200bindustry as studios grapple with rising development costs and \u200bhigh expectations from fans expecting a polished experience at launch.<\/p>\n
“They (Take-Two) need the game to be great and more \u200dtime makes that more \u2060likely,” said Michael Pachter, managing director, strategic planning at Wedbush Securities.<\/p>\n
Take-Two raised its fiscal 2026 bookings forecast, signaling its current roster \u2060of titles including “NBA 2K” and its mobile portfolio will be able to drive growth \u200ctill the “GTA VI” release.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala \u200cin Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Zaheer Kachwala (Reuters) -Repeated delays of “Grand Theft Auto VI” have failed to perturb analysts, who believe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152009,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[66571,49,48,121614,123244,123245,35885,61,123243],"class_list":["post-267851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-analysts","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-grand-theft-auto-vi","tag-gta-vi","tag-release-window","tag-take-two-interactive","tag-technology","tag-videogame-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}