Will Grand Theft Auto 6 actually come out this year? Will Square Enix invest another 10 years into remaking Final Fantasy 6? How much do you want to bet that Roblox gets hacked at some point and pictures of random kids doing age verification checks leak online? It’s the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture.
CES 2026 is this week in Las Vegas, with all manner of neat, bizarre, and depraved gadgets being peddled by tech companies big and small. So it’s the perfect opportunity to look back at a simpler time and watch people enjoy one of the best SNES games ever at the CES 1995 Earthbound booth.
Past Rockstar history offers some hope that GTA 6 may not be delayed again
Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier shared some of what he’s heard about the open-world blockbuster’s development on a recent episode of the Button Mash Podcast, in which he compared GTA 6‘s possible delay trajectory to that of Red Dead Redemption 2. “If you look at the history there, they announced it for fall 2017, then it slipped to spring 2018, and then it slipped again to fall 2018, and then it landed October of that year,” he said. “So I wouldn’t be super shocked if that is what happens again this time around.” If it does, that would mean that it actually hits its current release target and is not delayed again.
Whether or not GTA 6 actually makes it out this year as currently planed will be a bigger deal for other game studios than for actual players. As Schreier goes on to mention, entire game reveal, marketing, and launch plans of other games are being arranged around GTA 6‘s current November 19, 2026 release date.
Many games are no doubt racing to launch well ahead of it, or waiting until early 2027. Another delay would leave those same publishers and studios scrambling to try and fill that November void left in its absence.
The Phasmophobia dev is championing other innovative games with a new publishing label
The newly launched Kinetic Publishing label will offer “financial, legal and marketing support and wider development guidance” to upcoming games, the type of assistance CEO and solo dev Daniel Knight would have liked to have back when releasing Phasmophobia.
“It’s such an exciting time for indie game development, I can say that in the past five years I’ve learned so much,” he said in a press release. “The fact we’ve grown so much as a company means we’re now in the place where we want to support studios who come under our wing, and provide the support I’d have appreciated at the start of my journey.”
Roblox will now scan your child’s face no matter where they are in the world before they can use chat features
“Images and video used for Facial Age Estimation are deleted immediately after they’ve been securely processed,” the company wrote on its blog this week. The face scanning checks were implemented in some countries last December but will now apply to all users.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake‘s director doesn’t want to remake FF6
Director Naoki Hamaguchi wants a rest. “I have been involved in the Final Fantasy 7 remake project for now about 10 years from start to finish – and [I’m] now finally seeing basically the end of the tunnel – so in that respect, because I have used up all this time into producing this remake of Final Fantasy 7, should I be the one to undertake remaking another series?” he said in a recent interview with GamerBraves, (via Gamesradar). Hamaguchi had previously said that if he had “all the time and money in the world,” Final Fantasy 6 would be “very cool to take on as a remake.”
New Square Enix employees are so young, they grew up on Final Fantasy 13
“So recently, because the company has been growing and changing as new employees come in and the company just keeps going on,” Hamaguchi said in the same interview, via Genki,”the younger folk who come in don’t say Final Fantasy VI [is their favorite] anymore. They say, ‘oh yeah, Final Fantasy XIII was my favorite.’ So I really do feel the passing of the ages.”
