Rockstar has remained very tight-lipped about GTA 6‘s multiplayer component, the potential successor to GTA 5‘s incredibly popular Grand Theft Auto Online, not yet commenting on whether it will even launch one. All we know currently is that when Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives on 19th November, it’ll only include the single-player campaign.
But, in an interview with Bloomberg, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has seemingly revealed GTA 6 multiplayer’s launch window. “We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators,” he said. “You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer.”
Interesting. Here, it’s worth noting that GTA 5’s GTA Online mode arrived two weeks after the main game launched, but Red Dead Online – the online mode for Red Dead Redemption 2, and a more recent indicator of how Rockstar handles these staggered rollouts – went live seven months after that game’s initial launch.
The ‘next year’ referenced by Clancy here is, of course, wonderfully vague. It suggests we could see GTA Online Mk. II (that’s a name I’m giving it, not anything official) launch as early as January, some two months after the big single-player release, or as far out as the end of 2027. What’s more likely, though, is that we’ll see a similar cadence to Red Dead Redemption 2, with GTA Online coming closer to summer than spring.
If you’re worried about Rockstar dropping support for the current iteration of GTA Online, I wouldn’t worry. In 2025, Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, told IGN it’s smart when it comes to legacy brands, and knows that people don’t necessarily drop their old toys just because there are new ones on the shelves.
“I’m going to speak theoretically only because I’m not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn’t been made,” Zelnick explained. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles. As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I’m not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017, if I’m not mistaken. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they’re alive and we have this massive audience.”
“So we’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”
This latest bit of GTA 6 news follows another flurry of announcements in the run-up to its November release. This week, we got word of the inevitable GTA 6 soundtrack, and last week saw all Grand Theft Auto 6’s worldwide unlock times revealed ( Xbox owners can seemingly still use the old ‘New Zealand trick’ to play early, if they want to). Ahead of launch day, it’s also worth remembering that multiple retailers have issued warnings that GTA 6 codes are region-locked, so make sure you’re buying the right copy for the region you’re in.
Amid the building for GTA 6’s release, Rockstar Games and the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) are currently engaged in the final tribunal hearing relating to the sudden firing of 31 Rockstar North employees nearly a year ago, allegedly as part of a union-busting initiative by Rockstar.
