GTA6 is messing with Tomas Sala's plans. He'd intended to launch ShipShaper earlier this year, but "life got in the way," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "And then I saw all this stress about, 'Oh my God, GTA is coming, you have to pack it before September'."
The game is now set to launch into Early Access on September 2, suitably far off from GTA6's launch on November 19. Not that Sala thinks indies should be particularly worried about releasing near GTA6, which, as he points out, isn't launching on PC.
"I don't see why people are scared of it. It has its own fucking audience that doesn't go around buying nerdy niche sailing games or nerdy puzzle games or tiny story-driven emotional deckbuilders. They just want to play GTA." He points out that most players don't buy indie games – indeed, a 2025 Circana survey found that 63% of US players buy a new game once every six months or less (with 33% buying a game less than once a year), while only around 14% buy a game once every month or more. It's likely that this small percentage of enthusiastic repeat purchasers represents the main buyers of indie titles. "I'm pretty sure that's not the GTA audience," says Sala.
He also doesn't think that the blanket media coverage of GTA6 around its launch will have much of an effect. "The media doesn't cover indies anyway, except the flavour of the week – everything's Meccha Chameleon now. It's not like they're covering the top ten games that came out this month.
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