Rockstar promises next games won’t take as long as GTA 6 to make

Rockstar Games developers have explained how Grand Theft Auto 6’s lengthy development will help their future releases, and things won’t take so long moving forward.

Originally, Rockstar Games set out to release Grand Theft Auto 6 in late 2025. That was shifted to May 2026, before a further delay pushed the actual release date to November 19, 2026. All in all, the highly anticipated title has been in development for eight years, which is the longest project for them to date.

The long wait has, at times, frustrated players, with some believing that they’d never get their hands on a new GTA game.

While GTA 6 hasn’t yet been released, it has created a new foundation for Rockstar, meaning future games won’t take so long.

Rockstar promises next game won’t take as long as GTA 6

Speaking to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Rockstar’s head of development Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut said the next game won’t take almost another decade. 

“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.”

Garbut noted that Rockstar “foundationally” changed a lot of things in making GTA 6, and they’re not just going to “rip it apart” either. 

Rockstar Games

It is something that has been touched on by Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick in the past as well, calling it an extremely “complex” game to make. Rockstar have also admitted that it is so big, that they can’t show players everything through the story alone. 

What comes after GTA 6 remains to be seen. There have been reports that Rockstar will speed up the release of the PC version of the game, dropping it within the first three months of 2027.

That hasn’t been confirmed, and there also outstanding questions on what happens with GTA Online. 

Zelnick said that they will support the current version of the multiplayer title for as long as players are still playing, but plenty of others will want to abandon it for a new version too.