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The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path.

I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.

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GTA6 in isolation is not the issue. Coordination with the entire rest of the ecosystem is. Ads are bought and paid for 6 month before launch for certain time slots. Store shelf space is reserved. Miss the deadlines and those downstream companies suffer. Their promotion time slots / space, is unbooked and it's too late to fill it with something appropriate. So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April. Don't deliver and they don't do business with you next time. Maybe GTV6 is an exception here, that doesn't change the general point.

You could try to argue that companies shouldn't even start that process until the project is finished. Step 1: finish project, Step 2: book ads/shelf space, Step 3: 6 months later, ship it. But sitting on a finished project for 6 months is like not investing your money for 6 months. A lot of money is lost. Money can comes out of salaries

The downstream stakeholders (ad networks, retailers, etc.) need to be more flexible and tolerant of these events. If they had to deal with them regularly, they already would be. There's no law of nature that says things have to work exactly this way.

Meanwhile we have software devs and artists and product people damaging their mental health and suffering burnout for this. It's a video game. It's not worth it.

> So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April.

Make smaller promises but make them more often, and shit changes more often. Be clear about features 3-6 releases out, and when and why features get bumped. Companies delivering software are already doing this because they often can't deliver in 6 months and telling the customer it will be in the nest release a year from now does, as you note, make them stop doing business with you, so instead now you can tell them it's just delayed by a few months which they can maybe deal with.

Games don't really work like this, but games also don't seem to really work the same way at all and have different incentives.

> Store shelf space is reserved

I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?

Movies are just as bad, animation and vfx shops get crunched to hell. Fashion houses ahead of fashion week too.

Well, GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten, so after the first crunch, ever more crunch to get the 2nd attempt to the finnishing line.

> GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten

How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.

I agree this is unsubstantiated. I follow NXL and Giantbomb and havent heard thus reported.

They've missed their launch window by years now.

I mean the ideal sales window within a year, e.g period leading up to Christmas.

Of which year? GTA6 has been in development so long they could miss that period slightly in a year and decide to wait for the next year and polish it up and they likely wouldn't run out of things to fix or make better.