You won’t be waiting another eight years for the next game from Grand Theft Auto 6 developers Rockstar Games.
Grand Theft Auto 5 was released back in 2013 and the long-awaited sequel is set to launch next month (November 19). Grand Theft Auto 6 will be the first new game from Rockstar since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018.
However in a new interview with Bloomberg, head of GTA 6’s developer Phil Hooker said the amount of work they’ve put in to creating the upcoming game means future projects will be faster to create. “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly. I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content,” he said.
“We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” added co-development boss Aaron Garbut. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”
NEW: Why did Grand Theft Auto VI take 8+ years to make? How did Rockstar's culture change along the way? I went to Scotland and interviewed the company's top developers for this exclusive Businessweek cover story.Inside the making of the biggest game of all time: www.bloomberg.com/features/202…
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier.bsky.social) 2026-10-14T10:01:19.046Z
The Bloomberg article says Rockstar Games opened up a brand new Los Angeles-based studio just to create NPCs for Grand Theft Auto 6 while game developers took several trips to Miami to make the fictional city of Vice City feel as authentic as possible. These trips included hanging out at night clubs and riding with police to criminal hotspots. “Now you understand why it took so long [to make],” said Rockstar’s head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe.
According to industry experts, Grand Theft Auto 6 is the most expensive video game ever made. A 2025 report claimed Rockstar had spent between $200million and $300million working on hyper-realistic water and earlier this year, a former developer said he spent 39 months making broken glass look more realistic in the game.
Boss of GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive Strauss Zelnick previously explained that “development costs have gone up and up” but the team still “aim to deliver the highest quality entertainment on Earth, and that is costly.”
“We have the most amazing creative teams. We try to give them unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection,” he added.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch November 19 for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. PC and Nintendo Switch 2 release dates are yet to be confirmed, and there’s still no news on when Grand Theft Auto 6 Online will go live.
It’s also not known what game Rockstar will work on after Grand Theft Auto 6 either. Many fans had expected a sequel to Red Dead Redemption 2 would be their top priority but according to one report, the studio wants to revive their cult crime drama L.A. Noire.
The post ‘Grand Theft Auto 6’ follow-up won’t take 8 years to make appeared first on NME.