A Plague Tale developer Asobo has called Grand Theft Auto 6 an “ogre” as far as its dominance over 2026’s release schedule goes. It’s the same year its Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy game comes out, and it joins the crush in late August, a couple of months before GTA 6 crashes in.

We’ve seen acutely the effect GTA 6 has had on the release calendar these past few weeks, as publishers shunt their games into September or February 2027 to avoid its November arrival. But GTA 6’s presence has loomed like a Star Destroyer ever since it carried a proposed autumn 2025 release date, and with each subsequent delay and calendar shift thereafter. Doing the dance around it, Asobo told me, is inevitable when releasing a game this year.

“All along the production, we were like, okay, our release date could be this year – and there’s GTA,” Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy producer Eric Chort told me during a recent chat. “All the studios in the world were thinking about it. When you know that GTA is coming, you know that in terms of marketing, in terms of players, the time to play games, GTA is like the ogre, it’s the biggest one.

“So you try to adapt, you…try to avoid it. But then this year we see that there are only good games, or at least a lot of good games, so we’re like, okay, that’s the industry, and we try to make the best game possible.

“As a studio, this is the best you can do,” Chort continued. “You try to make the best game possible with what you have – the more authentic one. Have your identity make it different; try to make it different from all the other ones. After that, you’ve done your best and you’ll see. But definitely it’s an odd year to go out.”

The knock-on effect of The Great GTA 6 Avoidance is that September and February have become perilous months of their own to release a game in, so busy are they. To that end we’ve already seen some games – such as Phantom Blade Zero – bravely move closer to GTA 6 to win back some breathing space (and with such apparent nonchalance). I wholly expect to see more movement before September comes.

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy releases 27th August, so it’s at the vanguard of that very busy period, and judging by what I played a few weeks ago, it’s shaping up very well. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a very different game to the two Plague Tales before it, by virtue of its focus on combat and its new hero Sophia, but in many other ways it remains a distinctly Plague Tale experience. I’m encouraged.