Grand Theft Auto VI won’t arrive in 2025, but as a consolation prize, Rockstar Games dropped a video featuring a few snippets of gameplay for what’s still one of the most anticipated games set to arrive next year. That slice-of-life trailer cements just how little we know about Rockstar’s ultra-hyped open world. The big question on everyone’s mind: will GTA VI ever launch on Nintendo Switch 2, and if there are plans, will it arrive on the May 26, 2026 release date, or sometime after?
Rockstar’s new page for GTA VI offers a few scant details about the game’s story and its expansive cast of criminal characters. Players will terrorize Vice City and the surrounding state of Leonida Keys as Jason Duval, a military vet working for drug dealers. His partner in crime, Lucia Caminos, is an ex-con who wants to make her dreams of a good life a reality by any means necessary. At the top of the page, Rockstar says the upcoming open-world game will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S at launch. It makes no mention of PC or Switch 2 availability.
Rockstar normally takes a full year before it publishes its games to other platforms, like it did for Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC (these ports are reportedly more complicated than they seem). Still, the company has worked with Nintendo to launch past titles like the first Red Dead Redemption on the original Switch (though not the recent remastered version). Judging by analyst expectations and its massive wave of preorders, the Switch 2 is set to be the biggest console release of the past several years. The video game industry is relying on GTA VI to be a similarly landmark release. Publishers also hope GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar will sell the game for $100, setting a new price ceiling for game prices beyond today’s burgeoning $80 AAA game standard.
One industry analyst who spoke to Gizmodo mentioned Nintendo may not appreciate the press of the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto series finally coming to its largely family-friendly platform. Still, Take-Two has every reason to want GTA VI on Switch 2, and Strauss Zelnick, the company’s CEO, said as much during a recent earnings call. Zelnick hedged his bets, telling investors that Nintendo’s consoles aren’t just geared for younger players. He cited games like Civilization VII being on the Switch 2 as an example of the handheld’s aging demographic. He added that his company “actually would fully expect to support Switch [2].”
Zelnick recently had to assuage shareholders’ disappointment at the GTA VI delay. A Switch 2 announcement would do a lot to help in that regard, though we’ve not heard anything official. “We’ve had—obviously—a long-standing relationship with Nintendo,” Zelnick said during his February earnings report. “We’ve supported the platform when it made sense for the individual release.”
There’s also the matter of whether or not the Switch 2 is up to snuff to run GTA VI. The console’s Nvidia-made chipset is speculated to have performance roughly between a PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro. That being said, the Switch 2 is powerful enough to play Cyberpunk 2077, though only at 1080p when docked and hooked up to a TV. CD Projekt Red worked directly with Nintendo on the port, and developers recently said on a Nintendo Creator’s Voice video the port may be “the most cyberpunk way” of playing the game thanks to the addition of mouse and motion controls on the new Joy-Cons 2. CD Projekt Red VP of business development Jan Rosner told The Game Business that it makes sense for Cyberpunk 2077 to be on Switch 2 since “Nintendo’s audience is growing and broadening.”
Cyberpunk 2077 will fit on a 64GB game card, though that’s not the norm. Many other large, third-party games will be loaded on game-key cards, which are essentially a download code for players to get the title on Nintendo’s eShop. GTA VI will likely be a massive title, and it could easily eat up a huge chunk of the system’s 256GB built-in storage. Cyberpunk 2077 will be a slightly different experience than on PC, especially considering the difference in the size of the game, though Rosner stressed that coming back to Night City will still be as engrossing and violent as before.
Even if CD Projekt Red had an easy time porting to Switch 2, there are other technical aspects to consider. Rockstar’s games run on the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, though we don’t know how much stress it might put on both modern consoles, especially when playing at 4K. The only upscaling tech the game will have access to is the still-limited, AMD-based PSSR on PlayStation 5 Pro, so Rockstar would be better off making GTA VI accessible with the Nvidia-made upscaling on the Switch 2. There’s still plenty of time for Rockstar to finally let us hold up drugstores on Nintendo’s family-friendly console.
Read the full article here
