In a scene where a triple-A developer can, and will, drop a gigantic game out of the blue, other game creators understandably get a bit anxious. For indie developers, the passion project they've poured years of their life into may be swept away because a giant company decided to shadow-drop their latest and greatest game, consuming all attention until the indie's critical opening window has long been lost.

For a while, there was a permanent looming threat over everyone's heads: GTA 6. There were whispers that it would release sometime in the Fall of 2025, but nobody knew when exactly. And given how there were even more rumors that the game would cost $100, other developers had to adapt to the possibility that everyone would be holding onto their cash before the release date, and spending months in-game after it. And while indie developers were an obvious victim of this issue, it turns out that even video game giant EA was also a little scared.

EA's CEO hints that GTA 6 was a major concern for Battlefield's launch window

As reported by Venturebeat, CEO of EA, Andrew Wilson, gave a speech during the company's 2024 Q4 earnings call. In general, Andrew was pleased with the way the company performed, saying that it has "reignited momentum." Andrew pointed to the growing interest in its sports games, The Sims hitting double-digit year-over-year growth, and Split Fiction hitting twice the sales expectations at 4 million copies as proof of that momentum.

During the Q&A section of the speech, someone asked him if GTA 6's delay to May 2026 affected EA's plans at all. And while Andrew Wilson never explicitly names GTA 6 in his answer, you can practically hear the relief in his words that the gargantuan game is coming out later than expected:

“I’m not sure I can comment on the rest of the industry and their launches or launch timing, other than to say typically today, games take many years to build and develop, and it’s unlikely that if you weren’t already ready to launch in this window, it may be hard to get ready and take advantage of what might be otherwise a less competitive window that we may have anticipated earlier relative to Battlefield.

"What we’ve said all along as we’ve been building towards a window that we thought made the most most sense of Battlefield, but we wouldn’t launch into a window that we thought truncated the value that we’ve invested into the franchise, or the value that we think our players will derive from it once they jump in and start playing. I think now, without going too far, we believe that window is clearer than it was before, and we feel very good about launching Battlefield.”

It's crazy seeing a company as big as EA consider GTA 6 to be big enough to "truncate the value that it invested" in a Battlefield game. It just goes to show how much of an impact GTA 6 will make on the gaming scene when it finally does drop. In the meantime, why not check out that new GTA 6 trailer?