7 Major New GTA 6 Details Officially Revealed by Rockstar

Published Oct 14, 2026, 11:02 AM EDT A new Bloomberg report dives deep into the biggest game of the decade Image: Rockstar Games As we inch closer to Nov. 19, the long months of radio silence from developer Rockstar Games has given way to a steady trickle of new information about Grand Theft Auto 6, the most anticipated game of the year (if not the decade). On Oct. 15, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published a deep-dive report into the making of the game. While the Bloomberg piece doesn't delve into story details or what we can expect from the online component of the game, it does address several longstanding rumors about GTA 6's budget, tone, and overall scale. Here's everything we learned. 1 GTA 6 didn't cost $1.5 billion to make Grand Theft Auto 6Image: Rockstar Games Rockstar did not share a specific number for GTA 6's budget with Bloomberg. However, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe "did shoot down a popular rumor that it surpassed the $1.5 billion it cost to build Dubai’s Burj Khalifa." That said, Schreier still asserts that GTA 6 is nevertheless the most expensive game ever created, based on the vast number of staff working on it and the many years it's spent in active development. 2 GTA 6's eight-year dev cycle was caught up in RDR 2 Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive Even though GTA 5 was released all the way back in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Rockstar didn't start working on the sequel straight away. Though the initial plan for the team was to work on GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 concurrently, the latter required more manpower as development went on. According to Bloomberg, "as that game’s ambitions grew, [development lead Rob] Nelson realized he needed to mobilize most of Rockstar, including the senior leadership, to help finish it. That meant pushing GTA 6 back several years." GTA 6 only became the studio's primary focus after the epic western was in the wild. During those eight years, the game was delayed twice and experienced a difficult phase that Nelson referred to as “a dark period” when the vision for the project was still up in the air. 3 As the industry contracts, Rockstar is getting bigger Image: Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive Back in 2018, Rockstar Games was widely criticized for forcing developers to work late nights and weekends in order to get Red Dead 2 out the door — in no small part due to Schreier's reporting on the studio's labor practices while working at Kotaku. It seems to be committed to learning from past mistakes. Back in 2018, Rockstar had 2,441 employees across 12 offices worldwide, according to Bloomberg. Now, the company employs some 4,711 workers, which makes the studio much larger than any of its direct competitors. 4 GTA 6 leans more toward RDR2 realism than GTA 5 absurdity Image: Rockstar Games Schreier notes that "Red Dead Redemption 2 told a much more nuanced story [than GTA 5], with an emphasis on realism sometimes at the expense of fun. GTA 6 tries to find a balance between the two, but it seems to look far more toward [Red Dead 2] for inspiration: a game in which you can still throw $20 bills at strippers and mow down pedestrians, but one that also wants you to empathize with its Bonnie-and-Clyde-inspired protagonists." So it seems that despite all the internet chatter about in-game cocaine use and Jason and Lucia's nudity, players can still expect a prestige TV-worthy narrative from GTA 6. 5 GTA 6 was going to be bigger than Florida Image: Rockstar Games Confirming a longstanding rumor, Schreier reports that an early codename for GTA 6 was Project Americas, "because it aimed to feature big swaths of land across both North and South America." Later on in development, that scope would be narrowed to Miami and its surroundings. 6 GTA 6 uses AI — but not the bad kind Rockstar's latest is shaped by the dynamic relationship between Jason and Lucia. Allowing them to do everything together meant building complex artificial intelligence systems — "the traditional kind, not ChatGPT," Schreier observed. Long before people like Sam Altman decreed AI was essential technology that also had the potential to destroy humanity, AI was just a term used in game development to refer to human-made systems and scripts that governed how NPCs mechanics or in-game mechanics worked. Designing a massive game around two people, whose relationship ebbs and flows depending on the player's choices, took the team at Rockstar years to develop. “There’s trepidation about taking that on,” Nelson told Bloomberg. “Then you have certain people advocating for it: ‘We need this. This is a game about a couple. They have to be a couple.’ And so we had to commit to that.” 7 Complex NPCs led to at least one GTA 6 delay Image: Rockstar Games At one point, after the first official reveal of the game in 2023, Rockstar leadership realized that all those NPCs with unique behavior patterns were going to take far more time and manpower to make than they had initially planned. “The projections they were giving us were horrifying,” Nelson told Bloomberg. “I think when it became apparent that some areas weren’t going to make it, that’s when we decided to make the shift of date,” head of development Phil Hooker added. “We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make.”