Rockstar Says Its Next Game Won't Take Another Eight Years

Inside the long road to GTA 6, and why Rockstar believes the foundation built during its making changes what comes next

Eight years is a long time to wait for a video game. It is long enough for players to graduate, move cities, change jobs twice and still be checking the same studio's social accounts for news. Rockstar knows that math better than anyone, because it just lived it — and, according to a major new interview, it does not intend to live it again.

Bloomberg Businessweek published a cover story on October 14, reported by Jason Schreier, who traveled to Scotland to interview Rockstar's leadership about the making of Grand Theft Auto VI. Push Square reported on the Bloomberg story the same day, and NME and GamingBolt also covered its key claims. The headline promise, in the leaders' own telling, is simple: the next game should not take another eight years.

The foundation argument

According to Bloomberg, head of development Phil Hooker argued that the engine, tools and team assembled during GTA 6 will let Rockstar work more quickly on what comes next. Aaron Garbut made a similar point to Bloomberg: a great deal was rebuilt from the foundation up for this project, and now that rebuilding is done, the studio does not plan to tear it apart again.

That may sound like ordinary executive optimism, but there is a real production logic underneath it. Modern Rockstar games are not just bigger maps. They are dense systems — crowds that behave, lighting that shifts, characters who need to feel placed in a world rather than pasted onto it. Building the machinery that does all of that is the slowest part. Using that machinery a second time, with a team that already knows its quirks, is historically where Rockstar has moved fastest. Bloomberg's story draws the comparison readers will remember: after GTA III laid the groundwork, Vice City followed remarkably quickly by modern standards.

Nobody in the Bloomberg piece is promising a game next year, and readers should not hear it that way. "Faster than eight years" is a wide target. But it is still a meaningful signal from a studio that usually says almost nothing at all.

How GTA 6 actually took this long

The Bloomberg reporting also fills in the long road, and it is more human — and more complicated — than the simple story that Rockstar just took its time. According to Bloomberg, an early plan for GTA 6, known internally as Project Americas, would have spanned locations inspired by North and South America. That ambition was shelved and scaled back, in part so the whole company could focus on finishing Red Dead Redemption 2 first.

Earnest work on GTA 6, Bloomberg reported, began around 2019, with protagonists Jason and Lucia outlined as the center of the story. By then RDR2 had shipped in 2018, ending the previous eight-year arc, and the full weight of a much larger company could turn to one project. That company had changed scale entirely: Bloomberg reported Rockstar had 2,441 staff when RDR2 launched, and 4,711 people across 12 offices in 2026. Nearly doubling a workforce does not automatically make anything faster — anyone who has managed a large team knows coordination has its own cost — but it does mean the next project starts with an army already trained, housed and tooled.

The research details in Bloomberg's story, as covered by NME, help explain where the years went. Teams took trips to Miami to ground the fictional Leonida in something real — riding along with police and visiting nightclubs specifically to study the lighting. That second detail is peak Rockstar, honestly. Most studios study a city. Rockstar studies how a city glows at 1 a.m., because that glow is half of what players will remember.

The delays, and the people who absorbed them

GTA 6 did not arrive on its first announced schedule, and Bloomberg's account does not pretend otherwise. Head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe recalled, in Bloomberg's reporting, how Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reacted to news of the second delay — visibly stunned, by her telling — before the company ultimately backed the studio's call. It is a small scene, but it captures the stakes: a delay at this scale moves a public company's calendar, not just a fanbase's mood.

Kolbe also addressed the money. According to GamingBolt's coverage of the Bloomberg story, Kolbe denied that GTA 6 cost $1.5 billion. She did not offer a replacement figure, and readers should treat every budget number circulating online — denied or not — with caution until a company states one plainly. What is not in dispute is the scale implied by nearly 4,800 staff over years of production. This was not a cheap game to make, whatever the exact ledger says.

What this means after November 19

GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026, and for most players that date is the whole story right now. Fair enough. But Bloomberg's interviews point past it, to a question that has hovered over Rockstar for a decade: is the eight-to-thirteen-year gap simply what quality costs now, or was it a specific, painful transition — new technology, a doubled workforce, a pandemic era, a cultural reset inside the studio — that does not have to repeat?

Hooker and Garbut, via Bloomberg, are arguing for the second answer. The foundation is built. The team exists. The tools work. The next game, whatever it is — and Bloomberg did not announce one — gets to start from a running position instead of a construction site.

Skepticism is healthy here. Players have heard versions of "the next one will be faster" from many studios, and games have a way of growing to fill whatever time exists. But Rockstar saying it on the record, in a Businessweek cover story, weeks before launch, is different from a rumor. It sets an expectation the studio will be measured against. And if it is even half right — if the wait is four or five years instead of eight — an entire generation of players gets one more Rockstar game than the current pace would have given them. That is worth hoping for, carefully.