The long-awaited Grand Theft Auto 6 has a new release date: May 2026. The trailer looks beautiful, with modern photo-realistic graphics and a return to the Miami-like Vice City setting. Players will be able to play as Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple on an adventure of criminal mayhem.
For those unfamiliar with the GTA franchise, it has an open-world setting that allows you to run over pedestrians, get in shootouts with cops, or visit a grimy strip club. To be fair, the cops are corrupt, the strip clubs unappealing, and the pedestrians…well, they should be quicker if they’re living in a GTA city.
GTA 5 was released in 2013, and like each GTA before it, the game’s provocative content set off a flurry of pearl-clutching among the elite “save the children” set.
But this time…nothing.
The major controversy surrounding GTA 6 seems to be its delayed release (it was supposed to come out in 2025) and what, if anything, it signals for the video game industry as a whole (games journalists complaining about the addictiveness of social media are pretty cheeky given that people were making similar nonsense claims about video games not 10 years ago).
Of course, the muted response may change once the game is actually out and little Jimmy is asking Grandma for a copy for Christmas (assuming little Jimmy still uses a machine that can even take a physical copy).
If GTA 6’s 2026 release is greeted with yawns, it will be the surest sign yet that the video game moral panic is officially over, which would probably be bad news for GTA 6 itself, as the franchise always thrived on the kind of attention controversy generated.
One interesting question I’ve seen raised, though: Could the delay in GTA 6’s release actually be associated with higher crime rates? Yes, you heard that right. Could access to GTA 6 reduce crime — an impact that will now be delayed until May 2026?
Correlation ≠ causation
While we now can be pretty sure that the belief that playing violent video games increases aggression is wrong — in much the same sense that prior moral panics on everything from rock music to the radio proved to be wrong — thinking that the release of a particular video game could reduce societal violence is another hypothesis altogether.
It’s also one most scholars weren’t interested in exploring during the height of the video game moral panic. Fortunately, though, a few were, and they discovered an inverse correlation between America’s consumption of violent video games and the per-capita youth violence victimization rate, as reported in National Crime Victimization Survey data.
Put bluntly, as society purchased more violent video games, youth violence declined precipitously.
Modeling this relationship into the future is going to be tricky as more gaming switches to smartphones and non-physical copies of games become harder to track, but there’s little reason to believe that this strong inverse correlation has changed much in recent years.
Of course, this is just correlational data and subject to what are called “ecological fallacies.”
The most famous of these is the Nicholas Cage movies/swimming pool deaths correlation: The more Nicholas Cage movies that are released in a year, the more people drown in US swimming pools.
This is absolutely true, with a very strong correlation, but there’s obviously little reason to think that Nicholas Cage movies cause people to drown in swimming pools. Sure, maybe I’d prefer to drown than see yet another of the prolific actor’s movies, but we don’t seriously think there’s a causal link between them and pool fatalities. (Credit where credit is due: “Longlegs” was a sublime performance that well matched Cage’s inherent creepiness.)
I’d bet, too, that there’s a correlation between Beyonce’s increasing salary and the temperature of the planet, but we wouldn’t say Beyonce is literally making the world hotter (maybe figuratively, sure).
These kinds of ecological fallacies result in a lot of bad conclusions.
We’re likely seeing one now as people kind of loosey-goosey look toward teenage girl suicide rates (ignoring the much higher suicide rates among middle-aged adults) and try to attribute them to social media and smartphones, despite little evidence there’s even a correlation, let alone causation. That youth suicides have started going down in the US, despite little evidence that youth social media use has changed, is an inconvenient detail to be ignored.
However, there’s an extra wrinkle to the gaming data.
Building upon the basic inverse correlation between society’s violent video game consumption and actual youth violence rates, some scholars have asked an interesting question: What happens when specific highly popular violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, are released?
Virtual violence, real peace?
In 2015, Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, looked into the relationship between real-life violence and video games with time-series analyses, which look for correlations between two variables, but in a more sophisticated way that can help rule out ecological fallacies.
If violent video games caused youth violence, he should have seen peaks in youth violence after the release of highly popular violent video games, maybe a few days to weeks later. This should be a consistent pattern: Release a Call of Duty game, violence goes up. Have a lull in the release of highly popular violent games, youth violence should go down. Rinse and repeat.
What Markey actually found when he dug into the data was unexpected.
The release of highly popular violent video games did affect violent crime, but in the opposite direction most people might have expected. In the days right after the release of games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, violent crime went down. This pattern was consistent each time such a game was released.
This is kind of a rough ABAB design, by which I mean we introduce a variable and remove it, over and over, and keep seeing the same behavioral changes. To be sure, this isn’t a controlled experimental design and is still correlational, but it gets us past the ecological fallacy concern to argue that maybe there’s something more substantive here.
Furthermore, Markey’s results have been replicated.
Criminologist Scott Cunningham and colleagues found similar results when they looked at Index Crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson) in the US. Researcher Marinus Beerthuizen found comparable results for violent game releases reducing violent juvenile crime in the Netherlands. Sociologist Kevin McCaffrey also found parallel results.
Idle hands…
Why would this happen? The leading explanation appears to be something known as “routine activities theory.” Basically, the idea is that we take a group of individuals at high risk for a particular behavior, in this case teen boys and young men, who are vastly overrepresented among perpetrators of violent crime. Then we give them something to do that absorbs their time. In this case, that “something” is spending hours and hours playing GTA.
Because of this, they are, in essence, too busy to commit crimes. This causes violent crime to immediately drop. It’s not really any more theoretically complicated than that.
Does this mean that the delay of GTA 6 could cost some people’s lives? Basically, yes — albeit with some significant nuances around that conclusion.
It’s important to note that GTA 6 is so dominant as a video game that its delay is likely to push back the release of other games as well, as they seek to avoid being overshadowed. This could create something of a dry spell of high-profile releases, removing the “routine activities” that would otherwise have kept some young men busy and out of trouble.
A single game being pushed back could merely shift the number of violent crimes back to a different date, with an overall flat effect. But delaying a whole host of commercial games could have a more substantial impact, particularly if there’s nothing to replace GTA 6 in the interim.
Video game companies are engines of money generation, not social policy.
To be clear, I don’t want to claim that the numbers would be massive or that this is the main thing we should be worried about when it comes to crime. I don’t think we’ll see a 2020-like spike in violent crime — which was influenced by official policy and general social reactions to policing at that time — and I’d expect the economy, mental health, criminal justice policy, and other factors to have far more impact on overall violent crime rates than game release dates.
But even small wobbles will matter to those individuals affected.
Yet, there’s not much to be done. We can’t force video game companies to put out shooter games when they’re not ready. Companies are engines of money generation, not social policy. And, if we’re serious about criminal justice policy, we should avoid being distracted from issues around gun control, reducing fatherlessness and income inequality, and returning to an asylum-based system for the chronically mentally ill.
There’s always been the risk that the video game debate would distract society from more pressing issues, and I don’t want to contribute to that, even if it’s in an opposing direction. But there will probably be some non-gamers who will wish that GTA 6 had come out in 2025.
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