GTA 6 making-of: what Rockstar told Bloomberg about cost, delays and its next game

Five weeks before launch, Rockstar Games opened its doors to Bloomberg for a long feature on how Grand Theft Auto VI was made, published on October 14, 2026.¹ Development leads Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut spoke on the record, as did head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe, about the game's delays, its size, the 2022 leak and what comes after it.³⁴ It is the most detailed account Rockstar has given of the project so far, so here is what was actually said, separated from what is still only reported.

The next Rockstar game should not take eight years

The headline for most fans is about the future. Hooker, Rockstar's head of development, said the engine, tools and team built during this project will let the studio work faster, and that he expects it to grow the game outward with new content rather than rebuild its technology from scratch again.² Garbut made the same point more bluntly: the studio changed a lot at the foundations, and now that the work is finished it does not plan to tear it down.³

Context matters here. Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013 and Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, so GTA VI ends the longest gap in Rockstar's history.² Bloomberg pointed to Vice City, which arrived about a year after GTA III on the same foundations, as a precedent for what reuse can do.³ No new game has been announced, though, and none of this is a release window.² A realistic reading is faster updates for GTA VI and a shorter wait for whatever is next, not a new title in 2027.³

Cost: not $1.5 billion, but no number either

One of the most repeated claims about GTA VI is that it cost around $1.5 billion to make, roughly the price of Dubai's Burj Khalifa. Speaking to Bloomberg, Rockstar rejected that figure but declined to say what the real budget was.⁵ So the honest status is unchanged on the number itself: any dollar figure you see is still an analyst estimate, not something Rockstar or Take-Two has confirmed.⁵

The report also includes pre-order figures, with GameSpot summarizing it at about $600 million in pre-sales so far.⁶ Treat that as reported, not official. Take-Two has not published a GTA VI pre-order number, and pre-orders can still be cancelled before launch.⁵

Why it took so long

According to the report, a small team visited Miami in 2015 to plan the game under the codename Project Americas, with an early vision covering large parts of North and South America.⁶ That scope was later cut down to Vice City and the rest of Leonida.⁶ Rockstar had also meant to build GTA VI alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but Nelson moved staff onto the Western as it grew, which pushed the new Grand Theft Auto back by several years.⁶

Hooker said the game only really came together around 2022, describing a familiar pattern of long stretches where things do not work while promising pieces show through.⁷ Bloomberg also reports that Rockstar needed so many detailed non-player characters that it set up a Los Angeles team dedicated to them, and that the company nearly doubled in size to 4,711 people across 12 offices.⁵² When Take-Two chief Strauss Zelnick heard about the second delay, GameSpot reports his reaction was simple disbelief.⁶

The 2022 leak, in Rockstar's own words

Garbut, who has worked on the series since the first game, described seeing unfinished clips spread online in 2022 as weirdly invasive and hard to handle emotionally, comparing it to strangers going through your dirty laundry.⁴ The leak is why Rockstar staff have been back in the office five days a week since 2024. Kolbe said the policy will be reviewed after launch, but she doubted a return to hybrid work soon because the game is such a target for theft.⁴

What this changes for players

Nothing about the game itself moved. The date, platforms and editions are the same as before the report.⁸ What changed is the paper trail: Rockstar has now denied the $1.5 billion figure on record, given a company headcount, and said publicly that it expects to build on GTA VI rather than start over.⁵² We have updated our pages on Rockstar's studios and the 2022 leak with these statements.