Rockstar Says Its Next Game Won’t Take Another Eight Years

Rockstar believes its next major game will arrive sooner than Grand Theft Auto 6. The studio’s leadership says the technology, production tools and larger development team built for its latest open-world crime game should make future projects faster to produce.

The wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 has stretched beyond 13 years since Grand Theft Auto 5. It has also been eight years since Rockstar North released Red Dead Redemption 2, despite the studio previously launching Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto 4 within a seven-year period with a much smaller workforce.

In a new feature about the making of Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar executives acknowledged the unusually long production cycle and expressed confidence that the company’s next game will not require another eight-year wait. The feature is available through Bloomberg.

A bigger team and reusable technology

Phil Hooker, co-head of development on Grand Theft Auto 6, said the engine, tools and team assembled during development should allow Rockstar to work more quickly. He described the likely approach as building outward with new content rather than repeatedly rebuilding the underlying technology.

“The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” Hooker said. “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”

Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut added that the project involved fundamental changes, but said those systems are now complete and will not be dismantled.

“We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” Garbut said. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”

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Grand Theft Auto 6’s enormous production scale

Rockstar had 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018. By 2026, the company employed 4,711 people across 12 offices, including 4,020 staff working in development and quality assurance.

Those figures help explain why Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to rank among the most expensive video games ever produced. Rockstar, however, denied the rumour that development had cost more than $1.5 billion.

Why did Grand Theft Auto 6 take so long?

The game’s lengthy development was partly driven by Rockstar’s approach to detail. Aaron Garbut explained that even a single nightclub required individual animations and scripts for every clubgoer, along with separate drinks, music and lighting systems. The result was a backdrop built from many layers of detail to make the world feel believable.

Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing, summed up the trade-off: the more detail added to each environment, the clearer it becomes why production takes so long.

Grand Theft Auto 6 has become an example of a wider industry problem: increasingly detailed worlds, higher technical expectations and expanding budgets can push development schedules well beyond the timelines associated with earlier games. Rockstar had previously hoped to shorten its production cycles after the five-year development of Red Dead Redemption 2, so the latest promise will be watched closely.

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Release details

Grand Theft Auto 6 is scheduled to launch on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. A PC version is reportedly planned for 2027.

The game’s scale is also reflected in reports that one Rockstar developer spent 80 hours completing its main story, while its map is expected to be three times larger than the map in Red Dead Redemption 2.