Max Payne 3 Release Pushes Grand Theft Auto V to Late 2012, At the Earliest

Rockstar surprised a lot of people yesterday when it confirmed that Max Payne 3 is scheduled to arrive in March 2012, and analysts are already pondering when the company's next big project, Grand Theft Auto V, will be launched.

Rockstar is famous for its Grand Theft Auto franchise, but in recent years it's been scoring massive hits with other titles like Red Dead Redemption or L.A. Noire. Now, the publisher is preparing to release Max Payne 3 in early 2012, while other projects, like L.A. Noire for the PC or The Agent, are also confirmed to arrive soon enough.

Still, games industry analysts and pundits are looking forward to just one massive game from Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto V, which has been talked about for quite some time by many of them who believed the company will release it next year.

With the announcement of Max Payne 3's new launch date, however, Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz believes that GTA V might now appear in late 2012, at the earliest.

"With the announcement, we are increasingly convinced that we will not see the next Grand Theft Auto title until (at least) holiday 2012," he wrote in an investor note, via CVG. "We doubt that Rockstar would launch two of its titles in close proximity to each other given the studio's elaborate marketing campaigns and the likelihood that GTA could cannibalize sales from MP3 if launched in late spring."

Many analysts believed that Rockstar would deploy GTA V in 2012, but it now seems that the company might not even consider releasing it until 2013, considering it usually launches one game per year.

As of yet, Rockstar hasn't even confirmed Grand Theft Auto V, even if it's been quite busy hiring voice actors and registering domain names for the various websites that will be accessible inside the actual game.