Source: Boolmberg
Author: Jason Schreier
If the video game industry had an annual yearbook like schools do, Grand Theft Auto VI would be nominated in numerous categories: most expensive game, largest development team, project most likely to shock television hosts, best use of holding hands while committing crimes, most diverse body types, angriest pedestrians, most realistic depiction of sweat, and game requiring the most “research” trips to Miami Beach.
To create the world of GTA VI, Rockstar Games employees made numerous trips to Miami, the city on which the game’s fictional Vice City is based. They toured high-crime areas with police officers, photographed the city from helicopters, and walked among scantily clad dancers in famous nightclubs. The purpose of the latter was to study the lighting.
“Now you understand why this has taken so long,” says Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar’s head of publishing.
Several executives took part in an all-day interview with a Bloomberg reporter at the company’s office in Edinburgh. Rockstar spoke openly for the first time about the challenges it faced while developing the biggest, and perhaps most important, game it has ever made.
Rockstar has 12 offices worldwide. Rockstar North, the company’s main hub, is located in Scotland’s capital. With its ancient castles and cobbled streets, Edinburgh is completely different from Miami.
Rockstar North operates from a three-story building that was once the headquarters of the Scotsman newspaper. Screens in the atrium display images of GTA VI characters, while the nearby cliffs can be seen from the executives’ offices.
On a sunny day in late September, employees at the office are busy eliminating bugs before the game’s release. Progress is shown on monitors using green and red squares. Green squares dominate. That is a good sign. Perhaps the game will not be delayed again.
Fans sometimes gather near the Rockstar North office to obtain even the smallest piece of information about GTA VI. Some even track the number of pizzas ordered at night to determine whether development is approaching an important milestone. When they stay too long, a security guard comes to drive them away, just as in the Grand Theft Auto games.
Rockstar’s approach to secrecy is well known to other companies in the industry. During breakfast at the Marriott hotel across from the office, guests wearing clothing from other game companies are friendly but do not admit that they have come to visit the studio. A Bloomberg reporter’s joke, “I suppose we all came to see the city,” does not change the situation. Edinburgh taxi drivers are even said to try to obtain information about the game from Rockstar employees.
GTA VI, scheduled for release on November 19, is expected to become one of the biggest launches in entertainment history. According to Bloomberg, the previous game sold 230 million copies.
The first GTA VI trailer broke records with nearly 300 million views on YouTube. The first extended gameplay presentation released on Netflix became the platform’s most-watched content that week, surpassing a new Robert De Niro film.
Other entertainment companies have also structured their release calendars around the game. Some have held their products until next year because they believe GTA VI will attract all the attention for much of November. NBA player Steven Adams recently joked that when the game launches, “performance will drop” across major sports leagues.
Some analysts predict that the new Grand Theft Auto could sell 40 million copies on PlayStation and Xbox within its first four months and generate more than $3 billion in revenue.
Rockstar does not disclose how much it has spent developing the game. However, Kolbe denied claims that the budget has surpassed the $1.5 billion spent on constructing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Considering the time and labor invested in the project, Bloomberg considers it highly likely to be the most expensive game ever made.
Developers are not yet discussing the online component, which is expected to launch in 2027. The current Grand Theft Auto Online generates roughly half a billion dollars a year and remains one of the most important products for Rockstar’s owner, Take-Two Interactive.
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The risks and expectations are both high for Rockstar. The company has undergone major changes while working on GTA VI. Development has taken more than eight years. This includes two delays and a period that development head Rob Nelson calls a “dark period,” when the project’s direction was still unclear.
Rockstar had to learn to work without some key employees, nearly double the size of its team, and try not to repeat past mistakes. When Rockstar’s last major game, Red Dead Redemption II, was released in 2018, the company employed 2,441 people. Today, 4,711 people work across 12 offices. Bloomberg describes the scale of this team as considerably larger than those of rival studios.
During these years, the company faced problems related to work-life balance, major data leaks, and accusations that it obstructed unionization after firing 34 employees over alleged rule violations.
The game itself also reflects a changing Rockstar. Although the studio’s games are generally highly acclaimed, their tone can differ significantly. Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013, at the beginning of Barack Obama’s second presidential term. The game’s nihilism seemed to position it against the serious and idealistic mood of that period.
Five years later, Red Dead Redemption II offered a story with greater emotional depth. Its emphasis on realism sometimes came at the expense of fun.
GTA VI attempts to find a balance between these two approaches, but appears more closely aligned with Red Dead Redemption II in terms of inspiration. You can still throw $20 bills at strip dancers and run over pedestrians with a car. At the same time, the game wants you to understand the feelings of its protagonists, a couple inspired by Bonnie and Clyde.
Rockstar’s recent games are trying to grow somewhat more mature. The company itself is going through the same process. If we accept the idea that all works of art are, in some sense, about their own creation, it is possible to see traces of that here. In the first GTA VI trailer, one protagonist says words that sound as though they were taken from an internal company email sent during the early days of development:
“The only way to get through this is to stay together. To be a team.”
In 2015, Nelson and a group of other senior employees traveled to Miami for their first research trip. The plans for GTA VI were highly ambitious. Since the project was supposed to cover vast areas of North and South America, it was given the code name “Project Americas.” Its scope was later limited to Miami and the surrounding areas.
The initial goal was to develop the game alongside Red Dead Redemption II, which was led by the San Diego office. But as that project grew in scale, Nelson realized that completing it would require involving much of Rockstar, including its leadership.
This decision set GTA VI’s development back by several years. The advantage was that systems built for Red Dead Redemption II could later be used in the new project.
Previously, Rockstar worked on several games simultaneously across different offices. Under the new approach, most employees would focus on one project at a time.
Several important employees left the company after Red Dead Redemption II. Among them was Dan Houser, Rockstar’s co-founder and lead writer on most of the studio’s games.
These changes expanded Nelson’s responsibilities. Along with two other experienced employees, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut, he became head of development. Nelson and Garbut also led the Edinburgh studio. This structure is uncommon in game development. Usually, a project is managed by one director.
The three leaders say their daily work was not very different from that on the previous game: they managed teams and joined in wherever needed. However, some employees complained about the number of decision-makers, indecision, and conflicting approaches.
“No one has ever directly told me, ‘Having all three of you make decisions is frustrating.’ But I know people have said it,” Nelson says.
In his view, the same problems can occur when a project has a single leader:
“That person can also make decisions late. They can constantly change their mind.”
By the end of 2019, the leadership had established the foundations of the story. The criminal couple Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos would carry out robberies in the darker corners of fictional Miami.
But establishing the other foundations of GTA VI took time. Some things were clear from the outset: like previous Grand Theft Auto games, it would be a satirical open-world action game in which players could steal cars and engage in shootouts with police and criminals.
The challenge was determining the limits of the design. How realistic should fictional Miami be?
Most games make certain compromises on realism for the sake of entertainment and convenience. When you want to buy a beer at a store, you simply select the product and press a button. But when the graphics and systems are as detailed as they are in GTA VI, a beer bottle suddenly appearing in a character’s hand can seem strange.
According to Nelson, the leadership discussed questions such as whether players should have to approach the store’s refrigerator, take the beer, carry it to the register, and pay separately. At what point does this process start reducing the fun?
Should a character have to go to a grocery store, buy ingredients, and prepare a sandwich in their apartment to improve their stats? Or is it enough to prepare the sandwich directly?
Because much of the game was not yet complete, these decisions were often based on estimates.
As Nelson, Garbut, and Hooker tried to determine what kind of game the project would become, the company faced other obstacles. The pandemic forced everyone to work from home for months, reduced productivity across the industry, and completely halted work at Rockstar’s studios where actors’ movements and performances were recorded.
Rapid hiring also made communication within the company more difficult. Some experienced designers left, believing that progress was insufficient.
“It is very difficult to keep a team together during a period like that,” Nelson says. “I can put myself in the place of someone sitting in the studio every day, looking at this project, seeing that it is not coming together, and thinking, ‘Will this ever work?’”
In his view, what everyone needed at that time was trust and confidence. Like Jason and Lucia.
“Everything is fine. We will get through this.”
By 2022, Rockstar had developed enough of GTA VI for the overall picture to begin emerging when individual elements were examined closely.
“This process is very familiar to us,” Hooker says. “You go through a stage where nothing works, but you can see the result in individual parts.”
Nevertheless, many decisions still had to be made. One reason people love Grand Theft Auto is that each game contains enough activities to fill several games. From robberies to squatting with a barbell at the gym.
Nelson and the other leaders wanted the two protagonists in GTA VI to be able to do activities together in the open world. This required complex artificial intelligence systems. This was not generative AI like ChatGPT, but traditional game systems that control character behavior. The decision created numerous challenges that had to be solved over several years.
“It was intimidating to take this on,” Nelson says. “But some people insisted: ‘We need this. The game is about a couple. They need to act like a couple.’ So we had to make that decision.”
Once the system became functional, it turned into one of GTA VI’s most interesting innovations. A player controlling Jason can message Lucia and suggest meeting up. A few minutes later, they might walk hand in hand through a park, recalling the incident in which Lucia’s mother became angry with Jason.
They can then go to the gym together. While Lucia works out on a treadmill, Jason can squat with a barbell. Afterwards, they can rob a store together and flee from the police, joking and flirting with each other throughout.
The interaction between the two characters adds a new layer to the systems carried over from Rockstar’s previous games, which make the game world feel alive.
“It feels like someone is rummaging through your dirty laundry. It is like they are inside your head.”
That September, just as the game was beginning to come together, Rockstar employees faced some of the worst news possible. Someone accessed the company’s Slack channel through a phishing attack and leaked dozens of videos showing unfinished GTA VI gameplay.
Removing the videos through copyright claims could not stop their spread. Commentators debated whether it was the biggest leak in entertainment history. Some fans complained on social media that the game looked awkward and unfinished. They overlooked the simple fact that an unfinished game looks unfinished.
“It feels like someone is rummaging through your dirty laundry,” Garbut says. “It is like they are inside your head. You see an early version of your work in front of everyone. No one was supposed to see it. It feels strangely like an invasion of your personal boundaries. That makes it emotionally difficult to deal with.”
Rockstar issued a statement about the leak on social media. Law enforcement later identified a person suspected of carrying out the attack. But the damage could not be fully undone.
Before long, the company would introduce one of its most controversial work policies. The decision put much of the progress made in the workplace after the previous major game at risk.
Released in October 2018, Red Dead Redemption II became the center of discussions about work-life balance at Rockstar.
To create the studio’s vast and detailed worlds, developers had to work late nights and weekends for extended periods. In the game industry, this kind of intense period of extra work is called “crunch.” Although Red Dead Redemption II represented progress for many employees compared with previous projects, it still meant working 60-hour weeks for months.
Kolbe says that even before the issue became a public discussion, developing the game had been a moment for Rockstar to look inward.
“We all looked at one another and said, ‘We are never going to do this again.’”
In emails and conversations with employees, she and other leaders promised that the next Grand Theft Auto would be made differently.
“I said, ‘We are not going to finish this game through crunch,’” Kolbe recalls.
One solution was to bring more people onto the team. Others included reassessing expectations around the speed of completing tasks, planning work more precisely, and monitoring progress more closely.
Rockstar also introduced policies providing paid time off in exchange for extra hours worked, and in some cases additional pay.
“Things have not been perfect, but it is definitely better than during Red Dead II,” Kolbe says. “Whenever I say, ‘We have not crunched,’ someone will say, ‘I have.’ I do not want to argue with individual teams or people. But I think we worked differently this time, and I am proud of that.”
For many Rockstar employees, the cancellation of remote work was a more controversial issue than extra hours.
In 2024, citing security concerns, the company required all employees to work in the office five days a week. One of the decisions that caused the most dissatisfaction was banning GTA VI developers from accessing Rockstar’s servers and tools outside the office. Employees who had to stay home to care for a child or for another urgent reason were forced to use vacation days.
Kolbe says the company plans to reconsider this policy after the game is released. However, she doubts they will move to the widely used hybrid model of working three days from the office and two days from home.
“The security team would not like the game being in so many different environments,” she says. “If we did not have a game that so many people wanted to steal, perhaps it would be easier to discuss.”
Despite these measures, another major leak occurred in August, shortly before the Netflix presentation. Some people within the company complained, believing that all the restrictions had achieved nothing.
Dozens of Rockstar employees whom the Bloomberg reporter spoke with over the past several years have generally viewed the company’s efforts to improve its work environment positively. This includes attempts to reduce crunch and parting ways with managers who were considered mistreating employees or difficult to work with.
That is why the sudden firing of 34 people last year came as a surprise. Most of them were members of a group trying to form a union.
In subsequent legal proceedings, the fired employees accused the company of suppressing efforts to organize. Rockstar said they were fired for sharing confidential information on a Discord server with hundreds of members, including former employees. The group rejects this claim.
Unionization has expanded across the game industry in recent years. Employees at Blizzard Entertainment, Bethesda Softworks, and other companies have turned to collective bargaining over conditions they consider unfair, such as pay disparities and excessive overtime.
At Rockstar’s UK offices, meanwhile, employees have been discussing forming a union for at least eight years.
Rachel Crawford, one of the fired employees, says several positive changes took place at the company after Red Dead Redemption II was released. Workers wanted to participate in decision-making so that this progress could continue.
“We need broader support and power to achieve deeper changes in areas where management may not want to change. For that, we need a union,” she says.
The former employees want to be reinstated, or receive compensation if that is not possible, and have the unfairness of their dismissals openly acknowledged. Both sides are defending their positions before an employment tribunal in Glasgow, Scotland. A decision in the case is expected at the end of October.
“I just want responsibility to be accepted,” Crawford says. “I want my colleagues who want to return to their jobs to be able to return, and I want the people still working at Rockstar to know that they do not have to live in fear that something will happen to them.”
Efforts to form a union at Rockstar continued after the dismissals. Over the summer, the group requested voluntary recognition from the company and held weekly negotiations with management.
Kolbe says the process has been positive:
“We are moving in the direction chosen by the team. If they want a union, there will be one.”
On December 4, 2023, Rockstar released the first trailer for GTA VI. The trailer introduced the two protagonists and showcased Vice City through lavish and absurd scenes.
The video broke the record for the most-viewed non-music video on YouTube by collecting 93 million views in 24 hours.
This was also an important moment for Rockstar employees. It was not simply about being amazed by the numbers. The trailer helped them imagine what a successful result would look like.
On a team of thousands, it is easy for everyone to view the project only within the scope of their own work.
“Trailers are very important directional indicators for us,” says Jonathon Ashcroft, senior vice president of technology. “You might think that alignment comes through documents or communication tools. But nothing points us in the same direction as a trailer.”
The trailer also told fans that the game would be released in 2025. Rockstar’s leaders say they genuinely believed that at the time. Employees working directly on the teams were more skeptical.
As the deadline approached, reaching that date began to seem increasingly unrealistic.
“You feel enormous pressure and responsibility to deliver the highest-quality game possible in the shortest amount of time,” Nelson says. “Then, as you progress, you reassess the situation. As you get closer to the date, you have to decide whether it is actually possible.”
The development team told Kolbe that a delay was necessary. She then called Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick and said the game needed to be moved to May 2026.
Several months later, she had to call again for a second delay. This time, she asked for November. Zelnick was surprised by the news.
“He apparently said, ‘You are joking. Please tell me you are joking,’” Kolbe recalls. “But after I explained the reasons, he understood. We are very fortunate that he is so understanding. Many people would say, ‘Find a way to release the game on time, whatever it takes.’ We are very lucky not to have ended up in that situation. It happens to many teams, and we have all played those games. The result is not good.”
Zelnick says that if a game needs to be delayed to reach the level of quality it can achieve, it is usually “a proper investment of time and financial resources.”
November 19 appears to be GTA VI’s actual release date. Nevertheless, in the game industry, it is never possible to be 100 percent certain until the game is running on your device.
The leadership says there was no major or dramatic reason behind the delays. Numerous tasks simply did not come together as quickly as expected.
“The game never reaches a completely stable state,” Hooker says. “We never have an exact, unchanging plan. Even in the last few months, we have changed some things.”
For example, at one stage the team calculated how many NPCs needed to be written and animated to meet its goals. It turned out that the existing resources were not enough to handle the work.
“The forecasts presented to us were terrible,” Nelson says.
The company decided to solve the problem with additional funding. A studio was quickly established in Los Angeles consisting of writers, producers, and directors responsible solely for creating NPCs.
“When it became clear that some areas would not be ready on time, we decided to change the date,” Hooker says. “We could have met that schedule, but the game we wanted to make would not have been the result.”
For some people on the team, the delays produced positive results. Decisions were being made. The game was taking shape. Every new internal review showed progress and the results of decisions made years earlier.
During one of the final stages of development, Hooker was playing a test version of the game and had to go to a story mission. On the way, he bumped into another car. The driver of that car crashed into his vehicle in response and began shouting.
Both pulled over to “sort things out.” With his health bar low, Hooker decided to visit a nearby convenience store to buy restorative items.
On the way, another NPC insulted him and a fight began. There was no one at the store’s register, so Hooker robbed it. The police began chasing him.
After escaping and abandoning his car, he started looking for a new vehicle. He found a valuable car and set off to sell it. At that moment, another vehicle playing loud music nearly ran him over.
Hooker decided to follow that car. He found an area nearby, watched it, and discovered numerous objects he could steal. He then went to sell them to a buyer of stolen goods, where he learned about another activity.
Two hours later, he still had not approached the story mission he was supposed to test.
“I remember how much fun it was,” Hooker says. “Everyone came away from that review energized. Despite all the worries and doubts that had been weighing on you at that point, we thought, ‘If we do not turn away from this approach, something very special will come out of it.’”
The game industry is currently not in good shape. Budgets are growing, sales are stagnating, and investors around the world are pulling back from the large investments they made during the era of low interest rates.
Tens of thousands of game developers have been laid off since 2023. This has not happened only at struggling companies. The largest game publishers, including Take-Two, have also made cuts.
At the same time, a shortage of memory chips caused by demand for artificial intelligence has driven up hardware prices. As Bloomberg’s report highlights, Xbox and PlayStation consoles now sell for considerably more than they did when they launched years ago.
These difficulties are forcing many game companies to reconsider how they work in order to increase revenue and reduce costs. That is why the development of GTA VI stands apart from the broader direction of the industry.
While other studios are shrinking their projects, Rockstar has made a game even larger than before. While other publishers are trying to move development outside the United States, where costs are high, the company has established a new office in Los Angeles. Rockstar has also expanded significantly in India.
Other game companies are trying to prevent their budgets from exceeding $500 million. According to Bloomberg’s estimate, developing the new Grand Theft Auto may have cost more than twice that amount. What stands out is that the publication is highly confident the game will recoup its costs and generate additional profit.
Alongside a budget that seems limitless from the outside, one of Rockstar’s main advantages is its team, which has worked together for decades.
Nelson, Garbut, and Hooker attribute their ability to reach the finish line despite the difficulties of GTA VI’s early years to their extensive experience developing games and knowing how to complete projects. They consider this game the result of lessons learned over many years.
“The past 30 years have prepared us to reach this point,” Garbut says. “As a team and as individuals, we have been doing this work for so long that we have developed a shared understanding and body of knowledge. We can reach the answers to some questions more quickly.”
Rockstar’s leaders say GTA VI has laid the foundation for creating future content more quickly. They do not expect the next project to take another eight years.
“The engine, tools, and team we built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” Hooker says. “I am sure we can build on this foundation and create more interesting content by expanding the existing capabilities instead of increasing the scale every time.”
As a comparison, consider the transition from Grand Theft Auto III to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Because it built on the work done for the previous game, Vice City was developed in less than a year.
“We changed many things from the ground up on this project,” Garbut says. “But now that work is complete, and we do not intend to tear down and rebuild that foundation.”