Grand Theft Auto 6 was the presumptive Game of the Year for 2025… until it got delayed to May 2026. Since then, it’s been the presumptive 2026 Game of the Year instead. Following its latest delay, it’s still the game to beat at next year’s Game Awards — in theory. But in practice, its new release date makes things rather complicated.
GTA 6 is now set to be released on Nov. 19, 2026: a Thursday. The Game Awards, which takes place in early December every year, has a cutoff date for eligibility in late November. Typically, this date is set as the Friday of the third week in November, ensuring that the jury will have had an opportunity to play eligible games by the time the nomination and voting process takes place. Last year, for instance, the cutoff date for eligibility was Friday, Nov. 22.
You can see where I’m going with this. The likely cutoff date for eligibility in 2026, if The Game Awards follows its usual pattern, will be Friday, Nov. 20. One day after GTA 6 is released.
So, Grand Theft Auto 6 will be eligible for the 2026 awards, but it’s cutting things very fine. And this could create a major headache for the show’s organizers and its voting jury.
Nominations for the Game Awards are announced in mid-November — this year, the nominees will be revealed on Monday, Nov. 17. It follows that the nomination process takes place in the early part of the month, and voting on the winners happens after the nominations are announced, around the same time as the eligibility cutoff date.
All this is designed to ensure everything is ready for the awards show in early December. It’s also scheduled on the presumption that jury members will have access to early review copies of games released during those first three weeks of November by the time they submit their nominations ballots early in the month.
This is usually the case. Typically, by mid-November, the annual game release calendar is winding down; most major titles that you would expect to compete for Game of the Year are out by the first week of November. Barring December outliers like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in 2024 and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond this year, the last big release of the year is usually Call of Duty, in early-to-mid November — a known quantity that is rarely in serious competition outside the multiplayer and action categories.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is something else entirely. It will be categorically the biggest release of the year, certainly in stature, and possibly in actual game size too. And with a late November release date and Rockstar’s development process often going down to the wire, it is not a given at all that early copies will be available by the time the jury members are casting their nomination ballots early in the month. If jury members haven’t played the game outside the controlled environment of preview events — which Rockstar rarely holds, anyway — they will be rightly reluctant to include it in their ballots.
This presents The Game Awards organizers with a conundrum. For the biggest game of the year (or indeed decade) not to compete for Game of the Year or be represented at the awards at all, despite being eligible, would look absurd. But it’s a real possibility. The organizers will be hoping against hope that Rockstar gets review copies out in good time. For its part, Rockstar is probably too big to care about Game of the Year — enough to adjust its timelines around it, anyway.
The alternative for The Game Awards would be to shift its own habitual timeline back by a week or two to make sure the jury has time to consider GTA 6 properly. If the Game Awards 2026 is announced for a later-than-usual date in December (this year’s awards take place on Dec. 11), we’ll know why.
Or perhaps the Game Awards will get lucky, and GTA 6 will be delayed into 2027… you never know.
