The wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 has been a long one for fans of the series, with more than a 13-year gap since Grand Theft Auto 5. Even accounting for the fact that Rockstar had to complete the similarly massive Red Dead Redemption 2 before fully focusing on the next entry in its crime saga, it’s still been eight years since Rockstar North released that game. For context, the studio previously released Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto 4 with a much smaller staff over a span of seven years.
Rockstar leadership seems well aware of how slow things have been. In a new making-of feature on Grand Theft Auto 6 from Bloomberg, higher-ups at Rockstar have vowed that their next game won’t take eight years to come out. When Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018, Rockstar had 2,441 employees.
By 2026, the studio employed 4,711 staff across 12 offices, 4,020 of whom are in development and QA. As such, the game is likely one of the most expensive video games ever made, although the company denied the rumor that GTA 6 cost more than $1.5 billion to make. The Bloomberg article adds additional context for why GTA 6 had such a long development cycle.
At one point, Garbut explained that designing a single nightclub involved animating and scripting each individual clubgoer, then adding drinks, music, and lighting with “layers and layers and layers of detail” to make the backdrop feel as real as possible. GTA 6 has become a stand-in for troubling trends in modern game development where increasing technical fidelity and massive worlds have led to inflated budgets and lengthy development cycles. Despite Rockstar’s recent pledge to shorten the wait for its next game, as the Bloomberg article notes, the studio previously believed the same about GTA 6 after Red Dead Redemption 2'sfive-year development cycle.
Hopefully, it won't take until the mid 2030s to play the team's next project. Grand Theft Auto 6 will be released on Nov. 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. A PC version of the game is reportedly coming in 2027.
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