Rockstar says its next game after GTA 6 won’t take as long to develop

The studio plans to use the new tools created for GTA 6 for future games.

Thirteen years after the release of GTA 5, Rockstar Games is finally set to unleash GTA 6 upon the world this November. Much has been said about how long the game took to make, but Rockstar Games says that its follow-up to GTA 6 won’t take nearly as long. 

Developers at Rockstar Games were speaking to Bloomberg about the development cycle for GTA 6, which is due out on November 19. Rockstar veteran Phil Hooker said that the work done on GTA 6 will serve as the foundation for future games from the studio.

“The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” he said. “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”

The article dives into the 13-year journey from GTA 5 to GTA 6. While work for GTA 6 was officially underway as early as 2015—with Rockstar developers visiting Miami to begin preliminary work on building a modern Vice City—the game’s full vision didn’t come into focus until 2019. Many of the game’s elements were built from the ground-up, contributing to GTA6’s long development cycle.

Now, though, Rockstar Games doesn’t intend to start from scratch again when it begins work on its next title, whatever that may be. “We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” said artist Aaron Garbut. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”

GTA 6 is just over a month away. As we draw closer to one of the decade’s most anticipated game releases, stick with Shacknews for more updates.

Sign up for our monthly roundup of exclusive content, top stories, and updates from Shacknews - once a month, no spam.

Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.