Why Wasn’t Rockstar Games At The Game Awards?

The Game Awards are, thankfully, over, and twelve hours later, we’re still wondering about some of the things that happened at the show, and some of the things that didn’t happen at the event. For example, no one can deny that there were some surprising reveals last night, including some that no one saw coming, like the return of Mega Man or a new set of games coming from a galaxy far, far away. However, alongside all the legendary figures that were on stage to present awards, some teams, like Rockstar Games, weren’t there at all, that we could tell.

Why is that important? Well, they did win an award last night for having the “Most Anticipated Game” of 2026. Second, if you watched the opening montage of video games that opened the show, GTA 6 was featured quite a bit in it, despite it only being up for that one award that it would eventually get. So, why wasn’t Rockstar Games at The Game Awards?

The simple answer may be: there was no reason to be there. Also, given that we don’t know who all was actually in the audience, outside of Ben Starr, who was shown on camera numerous times, it’s possible there WERE people from Rockstar there, and we just didn’t see them.

As for why they didn’t drop anything game-related on the show, it might have been simply that they didn’t have anything to show! Yes, it’s not exactly a “happy answer,” but it’s the best one we got. After all, they only delayed their upcoming title about a month ago, so there wasn’t really anything new to show the audience without getting a lot of backlash, especially if they just used it to reaffirm the new November 2026 release date. As for the online content that they have out now, they could’ve done something about that, but the content had already been out a few days ahead of time, and it likely would’ve felt a bit superfluous to do it there, especially since it would’ve only been shown in “ad form,” which is one of the things that The Game Awards is infamous for, so they may have been better off NOT showing it off.

Finally, the team is only working on a select few games right now, so with the online content already out, and their next big title not coming out until next year, there was no reason to show anything off…because they didn’t have much to show off. Maybe next year, Keighley!