GTA 6 can wait, Rockstar has finally dropped a huge new release

This isn’t something I thought I’d ever write in my career, but Rockstar Games and Saudi Arabian firm the Advanced Initiative Company have just teamed up to finally release one of their games.

Yup, that’s right, folks: move over, Grand Theft Auto VI, because Grand Theft Auto V is being officially released in the year of our lord 2025.

This news comes from IGN’s Tom Phillips (via a report from Niko Partners), who states that Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online will finally be released in Saudi Arabia under their new “21+” age rating system.

Both GTA V and its online component have been banned from sale in both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since they dropped back in 2013, due to their extremely strict content guidelines.

However, as Phillips notes in their piece, folks in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have found workarounds, like importing physical copies of the game from other countries.

As Niko Partners notes in their report, this is due to the newly formed “General Authority for Media Regulation”, which has confirmed that the game will launch in both Saudi Arabia and UAE “on July 17 with a 21+ age rating”.

Now, if you ask me, I think something else is going on here– and it’s GTA VI-related.

Grand Theft Auto VI is set to be the biggest video game launch of our lifetimes.

I think the mass importing of copies of GTA V probably made some folks over in Saudi Arabia and the UAE realise that they’d be missing out on a cut of the massive sales that GTA VI is set to generate if it weren’t made commercially available.

GTA V suddenly becoming legally available for purchase is just the first step in raking in all of the cash that GTA VI’s release is going to earn them.