Rather than launching same time globally, Grand Theft Auto VI will instead release based on local midnight times. The first region to get the release will be New Zealand, followed by Australia, Japan and Hong Kong. USA, Canada and Mexico are much further down the list whilst the UK sits in the middle.
Here is the order of release known so far:
- New Zealand
- Australia
- Japan and South Korea
- Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan
- Western Indonesia and Thailand
- UAE
- Saudi Arabia and Turkey
- Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Israel, Romania, South Africa and Ukraine
- France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and other Central European regions
- UK, Ireland, Portugal and Iceland
- Argentina, Brazil (Brasília region), mainland Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay
- Bolivia
- US and Canada (Eastern time), Colombia, mainland Ecuador, Panama and Peru
- Central Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua
When converted for local UK/US time, New Zealand will technically be getting the game a day earlier than some countries. This isn’t anything new as New Zealand is known for getting global launches earlier and a lot of people, especially those on Xbox tend to change their region momentarily to have their copy unlock early.
We personally like the staggered approach since it means that everyone will be able to play as soon as it’s the 19th locally than having to wait till earlier hours of the morning. With a game as anticipated as Grand Theft Auto VI, players will want to play as soon as possible, especially since a lot of them will most likely be taking some days off to play the game.
This should also help lighten some of the load on the PlayStation and Xbox servers since a lot of people will be downloading the game at the same time. Despite that, I would still advice people to prepare for potential PSN or Xbox Live outages.
Grand Theft Auto VI will launch on the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 on the 19th of November, with preloads starting November 12th.
