Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier published a long report on the making of GTA 6 on Wednesday, October 14, with new interviews with Rockstar Games' leadership. It is the first time the studio has spoken openly about the problems it faced during development. Schreier visited Rockstar and saw the game running, but warned that the story is not a list of gameplay features: it focuses on why GTA 6 took more than eight years to finish and how the studio changed over that time.

It all started with a trip to Miami in 2015

According to the report, the team's first research trip was to Miami in 2015, with Rob Nelson, one of the heads of development. At the time, the project was codenamed Project Americas, as Schreier had already reported in 2022, and the plan was ambitious: to include parts of North and South America. Over time, Rockstar narrowed the scope to Vice City and the fictional state of Leonida, covered in our Leonida guide.

The original idea was to make GTA 6 alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. But Nelson ended up moving most of the company onto finishing the western, which pushed GTA 6 back by a few years. Full development only began in 2018, after Red Dead 2 launched. From then on, the studio decided to focus almost its entire team on one big project at a time.

A change at the top and a "dark period"

After Red Dead 2, several key people left Rockstar, including co-founder Dan Houser. Instead of a single lead, the game came to be run by three heads of development: Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut.

Nelson described to Bloomberg a "dark period" when the game's overall vision was not yet clear. The pandemic, rapid hiring and departures from the design team made things harder still. The skeleton of Jason and Lucia's story was only settled at the end of 2019.

Why the game was delayed

The first trailer, from December 2023, promised a 2025 release. Then came the delay to May 2026 and, finally, to November 19, 2026. According to the report, one of the central reasons was a lack of capacity to write and animate the number of characters the game world required. Rockstar's solution was to create a new studio in Los Angeles, with writers, producers and directors dedicated to that work.

Another challenge was the lead couple. Nelson explained that carrying Jason and Lucia's relationship into the open world, not just the missions, required sophisticated AI. The leadership debated whether it was worth the effort and decided it was.

Phil Hooker described a playtest moment that convinced the team it was on the right track: after hitting another car, he set off a chain of fights, robberies and police chases and spent about two hours away from the story mission he was supposed to be playing.

A studio nearly twice the size

Rockstar had 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018. Today it has 4,711 people across 12 offices. Part of that growth was a response to criticism of the grueling hours on Red Dead 2: according to head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe, the studio did not want to finish GTA 6 through prolonged overtime. To that end, it expanded the team, changed its planning and began offering paid time off or extra pay for additional hours. Kolbe acknowledged the approach still has flaws.

Security also changed daily routines. After the leaks, Rockstar began requiring in-office work five days a week starting in 2024 and blocked access to the game's tools outside the office. According to the report, the new leak in August 2026, CyberLeek, raised internal questions about whether the measure works. Bloomberg also points to the firing of 34 employees in 2025, a case still before an employment tribunal in Scotland.

Budget and the next game

Rockstar did not reveal how much GTA 6 cost. Kolbe dismissed the rumor that the budget exceeded $1.5 billion, a figure compared to the cost of Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper. Even so, Bloomberg considers it almost certain that GTA 6 is the most expensive game ever made.

The most encouraging news is about the future. Hooker said the engine, tools and team built for GTA 6 will let the studio work faster, and Garbut said Rockstar does not plan to tear down that foundation for its next project. In other words, the next big game should not take eight years. The report recalls that GTA: Vice City came out less than a year after GTA III precisely because it built on earlier work. Rockstar, however, did not say what that next game will be or when it will arrive.

What is still unknown

  • GTA 6's actual budget.
  • What Rockstar's next project will be and how soon it will arrive.
  • Whether the in-office rule will change after the November 19 launch.