GTA 6 follow-up will be sooner than you think confirms Rockstar

Rockstar has revealed the studio’s next game will not take another eight years, as it builds on the foundation of GTA 6.

While all the attention is around GTA 6, ahead of its launch on November 19, there have also been some rumblings around Rockstar’s next project. 

The studio is presumably working on the expected GTA Online equivalent for GTA 6, which is apparently set to drop next year. However, there have also been rumours that Rockstar’s next game is a sequel to L.A. Noire. 

Rockstar hasn’t confirmed anything in regards to its next project, but it has confirmed that it won’t take another eight years to come to fruition – with their last game being 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. 

Speaking to Bloomberg, Phil Hooker, head of development at Rockstar Games, revealed that GTA 6 has laid a foundation for the studio which it will build on with future projects. 

‘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.’

The wording makes it unclear if they are referring to some kind of expansion to GTA 6, or a different game entirely. However, in the report, Jason Schreier states, ‘one comparison point might be the transition from GTA 3 to GTA: Vice City’. Vice City came out less than a year after GTA 3 and reused the same engine and many of the same assets.

This implies Rockstar is potentially planning a successor to GTA 6 – whether a standalone title in the vein of Vice City or DLC – that isn’t GTA 7. However, the comments are very vague, so it could be referring to another game entirely, built using the same engine. 

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

Elsewhere in the report, Rockstar provides some explanation behind the game’s delays over the years. GTA 6 was originally slated to launch in 2025, but it was pushed back to May 2026, and then subsequently to November 19, 2026. 

Rockstar’s studio director, Jennifer Kolbe, recalled Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick’s reaction to the second delay: ‘I think he said, ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.’ But once we talked through why, he got it. And I think we are really lucky that he is as reasonable as he is, because a lot of people would say, ‘You’d just better figure out how to ship it.’  And we have been really, really lucky that we have not found ourselves in that place, because that happens to a lot of teams, and we’ve all played those games. It’s not great.’

One of the reasons for the delay was related to the number of non-playable characters they’d have to write and animate to pull off their ambitions, which they quickly realised wasn’t feasible within the timeframe. In response, they set up a studio in Los Angeles solely dedicated to creating non-playable characters. 

‘I think when it became apparent that some areas weren’t going to make it, that’s when we decided to make the shift of date,’ Hooker added. ‘We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.’

GTA 6 is set to launch across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, 2026. The PC version is reportedly set to come out in early 2027. 

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