Rockstar Promises Its Next Game Won’t Take Another 8 Years

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.

“The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” said Phil Hooker, co-head of development on Grand Theft Auto 6. “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”

“We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” added Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”

Other tidbits from the article put the sheer scale of the game’s development into perspective. 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.

Why did it take so long for Grand Theft Auto 6 to come out?

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. “And now you understand why it took so long,” said Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing.

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.