If the wait between 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and next month’s Grand Theft Auto 6 was simply too much to bear, take heart: Rockstar says that it won’t take nearly a decade for its next game to arrive.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Rockstar representatives talked about the long and expensive road to making Grand Theft Auto 6, and in-between talking about its delays, accusations of union-busting, and the multiple leaks the game has suffered throughout the years, development leads Rob Nelson, Phil Hooker, and Aaron Garbut talked about how the studio achieved the game’s massive scale, and how it plans to use a decade’s worth of new resources to hopefully ensure its next game doesn’t take as long to come out.
According to Hooker and Garbut, working on GTA 6 for so long has allowed the studio to find ways to work more efficiently, and it has no plans to toss that all aside when it starts working on whatever’s next.
“The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” Hooker says. “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”
“We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” Garbut added. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”
Bloomberg makes the comparison to how Rockstar, in the early aughts, was releasing games annually, with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City coming out just a year after Grand Theft Auto III thanks to it being built upon the previous game’s foundations. While I wouldn’t expect any new Rockstar games in 2027 because most AAA companies are no longer operating on an annualized schedule, this could mean that major updates for GTA6 come along reasonably quickly, and that whatever the next big game the studio puts out is, it won’t take as much time in the oven as Jason and Lucia’s crime drama will have when it finally launches on November 19.