The Borderlands 4 release date gives us a clue about Grand Theft Auto 6’s arrival

The flash flood of marketing that poured forth from PlayStation’s State Of Play last night splashes wetly upon we PC players too. Among the teasers and crossover announcements, 2K revealed the release date for Borderlands 4 in a short ‘n’ shooty trailer. I’m not a big fan of this long-running looter shooter. But in showing us its release date Take-Two have given us an indication of when Grand Theft Auto 6 will not release. And that’s mildly interesting.

Borderlands 4 is coming out September 23rd, as celebrated by the maniacally cackling mascot at the end of the trailer. The lootsy shootsy was announced shortly before Christmas last year, and will have the usual 4-player co-op, random weapons, and sense of “humour”. This time your team of lootbox addicts will be battling “the oppressive Timekeeper, a ruthless dictator who dominates the masses from on high.”

So, Borderlands again. Still, there’s a fun bit of obvious deduction to glean here. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reassured shareholders in an earnings call last week that the company was confident they were giving enough space to their big releases. That’s to be expected, publishers like to space out their games for maximum sales. All of which suggests GTA 6 probably won’t hit the shelves in September. Or at least the weeks around Borderlands 4 will be a big buffer zone. Zelnick himself has twice confirmed the open world crim sim is on-target for an autumn 2025 release.

It’s fun to speculate that the other big games of the season are playing “release date chicken” because of Grand Theft Auto 6, which still hasn’t announced when it will arrive to nuke all the other games released that week from orbit. But studios can always reschedule once they see it coming, and some game buyers don’t care about GTA at all. Still, it feels like Take-Two has eliminated at least a couple of possible weeks from the guessing game.