Why does GTA 6 keep getting delayed? When Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed on Thursday, the famous quote from the series perfectly captured the feelings of many video game fans. It's the second time maker Rockstar Games has told players they'll have to wait even longer for what is likely to be one of the biggest entertainment releases ever. The notoriously perfectionist developer has a history of holding on to its blockbusters until it's happy with them, so the news wasn't a complete surprise. But it has got millions asking what's taking so long, and why. Rockstar Games officially confirmed it was working on GTA 6 in February 2022 and an initial trailer, released almost 18 months later, said it would come out in 2025.

Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. In July this year workers at Build a Rocket Boy, a video game studio in Edinburgh, were called to an all-staff meeting. Their first ever game, a sci-fi adventure called MindsEye, had been released three weeks earlier - and it had been a total disaster. Critics and players called it broken, buggy, and the worst game of 2025. Addressing staff via video link, the company's boss, Leslie Benzies, assured them there was a plan to get things back on track and said the negativity they'd seen was uncalled for.

How much does it cost to make a video game? The development expenses of blockbuster games are closely guarded business secrets, but they have been climbing ever higher over the years towards big Hollywood-style spending. Industry leaks have exposed how the budgets of major video games are spiralling upwards: 100m, or 200m, even more. One of the bestselling franchises, Call of Duty, saw costs balloon to 700m ( 573m), a number only revealed recently when a reporter dug into court filings. There is, however, one game with a budget that is anything but secret.

"It's dangerous to go alone! Take this," says the famous quote from the iconic game The Legend of Zelda. In life, it is dangerous to go it alone--and having a supportive community is critical, particularly for people experiencing mental health challenges. This memorable line of dialog inspired the name of the nonprofit Take This, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in November. The organization has been promoting mental health by combating toxicity in the gaming space for the past decade, and its reach and impact continue to grow and create positive change.

Many of us were taught from a young age that it is not polite to eat with our mouths open, so have adopted a smaller, more socially-acceptable chew. However, an Oxford University expert is encouraging us to disobey our parents' teachings and take the biggest bites we can. This is because the compounds that give our food flavour can reach the back of the nose better while chewing open-mouthed. 'We've been doing it all wrong,' said Charles Spence, a Professor of Experimental Psychology. 'Parents instil manners in their children, extolling the virtues of politely chewing with our mouths closed.

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. "The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen," an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that "Star Wars" came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking "Star Wars" rogue played by Billy Dee Williams.

It's a comment I've seen hundreds of times, or variations of throughout my time here at Kotaku: internet complaints about the quality of reviews. "A bot can do better than this," some would cry. So let's put that to the test. I've run this test before, although last time I fed Kotaku Australia comments into the machine learning model. That was run using a free online version of the GPT-2 language model, although the more powerful GPT-3 model is available now if you're willing to pay to access the API. So I did that, specifically through a tool called Shortly. We got some fun responses last time the AI pretended to double as a commenter.

Like Grenier, other developers speaking to The Washington Post shared that working in the pandemic was challenging from a mental health, personal workload and collaboration standpoint. As offices closed worldwide, developers shifted to working from their living rooms and kitchen tables. Meanwhile, gaming took off as people stayed home, increasing the demand for content and the appetite for multiplayer games and hardware. In 2020, 79% of United States consumers, or about 261 million people, played a video game, up from 73% of consumers, or 241 million, in 2019, according to market research firm NPD Group.

What might have been a turning point for developers was erased when in 2008 then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new set of overtime exemption rules for computer workers in California, shifting the overtime exemption down from $49.77 an hour or $103,521 a year, to $36 an hour or $75,000 a year. This new rule moved the overtime threshold below the average salaries for many in the games industry -- the average salary for programmers in 2007 was $80,886 and $77,131 for producers -- and it included subtle changes to the language describing the specific kinds of work that could qualify for the exemption to make it more broadly applicable. Labor advocates described the move as a concession to help tech and entertainment companies minimize their overtime liabilities and encourage them to keep jobs in California instead of moving their operations to places with aggressive tax credits and lower cost of doing business, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Although a project 16 years in the past, the aftermath of "Battle for Middle-earth" made overt what happened behind-the-scenes as the video game industry grew from small teams to major productions involving hundreds. Lasting fallout from the game's creation made long hours and developer treatment an issue warranting attention. "Battle for Middle-earth" became the catalyst for studios to begin rethinking their approach, in part due to widespread public outcry and young developers realizing their workweeks were anything but normal. Even a decade and a half later, crunch is still prevalent in the industry. Earlier this year, CD Projekt Red's extended development of "Cyberpunk 2077" raised ire after the studio reneged on an earlier promise to avoid crunch, forcing six day workweeks on its employees.