Despite several delays and a budget rumored to be nearing $1 billion, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier reports that Take-Two’s magnum opus, Grand Theft Auto 6, is still not content complete as of January 2026.
But what does that actually mean? And how could it affect GTA 6’s anticipated November release? Could another delay be on the table?
Let’s break down what “content complete” really means, and why it matters.
How Milestones Work in Game Development
All major game publishers have milestones – sets of goals for in-development projects to hit that help indicate and monitor the health of a games’ production. These milestones represent demonstrable, playable portions of a game that determine if a publisher passes or fails a project.
A successful milestone frees up budget for the next phase. This allows the developer to increase production capacity by hiring more developers or dedicating more resources to the game.
It also gives the publisher a chance to critically evaluate the game’s current state, often through market testing. These tests help determine how much budget to allocate to marketing and reveal any red flags the team needs to address in the next milestone.
Conversely, it’s also an opportunity for the publisher to assess the game’s market position against competitors and adjust the strategy accordingly.
However, when a milestone fails, the development team misses the goals it committed to. This usually signals deeper issues in production, leadership, or technical execution that the team must resolve.
The output of a failed milestone can be substantial. This can range from the outright cancellation of the project to changes in studio leadership. In rare cases, it can even result in granting more resources to the project.
In the case of a AAAA game like GTA, publisher Take-Two views it as “too big to fail.” They will reallocate resources away from any other game in progress to help GTA reach its milestones.
The Milestone Pipeline
Milestones represent some form of development goal; in the case of Take-two and 2K, the milestones are:
- Pre-Production
- First Playable
- Vertical Slice
- Feature Complete
- Content Complete
- Design Complete
- Art Complete
- Audio Complete
The game then moves through several micro-milestones focused on bug fixing. During this phase, the team submits the project to external stakeholders like the ESRB for rating while simultaneously sending it to platform holders such as PlayStation for final approval.
To understand where Grand Theft Auto sits, we need to look at those earlier milestones.
Pre-Production is when planning and research happens, designers create design docs, producers define milestones, engineers experiment with new tech, etc. All of this is in service of the first playable, a milestone in which the game is just that, playable. The player can move around a map for the first time. First playable is in service of a bigger milestone, the vertical slice.
A vertical slice is best visualized as a slice of pie. It should give the player a full experience of what the completed game is, albeit just a small slice. This is often a single mission that demonstrates the title’s unique gameplay.
For many games, this is the most important milestone and failure here may cause the title to be outright cancelled. Even if the milestone is technically successful, the publisher may use this opportunity to evaluate the games marketability. They may choose to cancel the project if they believe it will be entering too competitive of a market.
The next two milestones are where Grand Theft Auto VI currently is.
First is Feature Complete. This is a design and engineering heavy milestone in which all the unique gameplay systems must be functional, even if they do not feature final art. Essentially, all of a game designer’s bag of tricks must be complete at this stage. These are the unique systems needed for them to craft compelling content. Features could include gameplay oriented systems like swimming, combat, drivable vehicles, etc. They also include backend technology needed for other disciplines to complete their work, such as an audio and art pipeline.
What Content Complete Means
Content Complete means the game is completable from start to finish (known as the golden path) and that side content or other activities are also complete. Often this means levels or the environment are “grey boxed” in which final art is not yet in the game, so designers use “grey boxes” to indicate vague environmental details or level design, with artists finishing the content later. Another important detail is that playable doesn’t necessary mean done, and things like enemy placement and balance may still need additional work that will be done in the design complete milestone. But for now the player is able to fully complete the game from start to finish without issue.
Content Complete is another critical milestone, and bleed over work into the next milestone from this one is often the cause of delays and further production issues. Past content complete, each of the individual disciplines are now responsible for completing their work on the game, design, art, and audio in that order. While this occurs, things like cinematics, voice acting, and bug fixing are being worked on as well. After all discipline milestones are reached, the game enters a period of bug fixing known as “hardening” before it is finally considered finished.
Does this mean Grand Theft Auto VI will get delayed again?
Honestly? Probably. It’s important to understand that Grand Theft Auto VI is unlike any other video game project ever created. Earlier I mentioned the term AAAA, a relatively new term to describe a project so large that it cannot fail without drastic implications to not only the developer and publisher but the wider industry itself. These games will effectively bankrupt the developer and publisher should they fail and thus the publisher is in a position of allocating most if not all its resources into making sure the game is successful.
That being said, Take-Two is keenly aware that people want GTAVI. The rumors swirling that they may even consider a $100 cost for the game speaks volumes to the confidence the publisher has that you will pay that regardless of how upset you are with delays. The two more important factors to them are making sure they deliver a polished experience that lives up to the franchises reputation, and (probably) more importantly, the pipeline for Grand Theft Auto VI Online is complete and ready to launch day and day with the game.
Make no mistake, GTAVI will be the best selling and most profitable game on day 1 of its release. But Take-Two isn’t happy with just that, and it finds itself positioning Grand Theft Auto Online to compete with wildly profitable live services like Fortnite and Roblox. Indeed, the most costly part of this production may be the need to ramp up a live ops team capable of creating new Grand Theft Auto content weekly, instead of every few months.
So does this mean a delay? While Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has repeatedly denied any further delays, in reality delays only further benefit the title. Games launched towards the end of a system generation greatly benefit by being available to the largest audience possible, something abundantly clear when Grand Theft Auto V launched at the tailend of the PS3/Xbox 360 era. There is no benefit to not delaying the game until absolutely necessary. And from a simple production standpoint, the fact that a game this large is not at Content Complete yet is alarming, and doesn’t bode well for GTAVI hitting its November release date.