GTA 6 was originally called Project Americas, and the plan was far bigger than Miami: parts of North and South America on one map. That comes from the report Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published on October 14, built on a full day of conversation with Rockstar executives at the Edinburgh office. It's the first time the studio has explained publicly, and by name, why the game took so long.

A note on what we read: the Bloomberg piece is behind a paywall, so everything below comes from four outlets that summarized it (VGTimes, GamerFuzion, DualShockers and TheGamer). Where they differ, we say so. The statements are paraphrased, not quoted, because none of the pages carries the original wording.

How it started: 2015, Miami and a bigger game

Rob Nelson, one of the development heads, took other staff on the first research trip to Miami in 2015. The idea was to build GTA 6 alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. But RDR2 grew, and Nelson concluded that finishing it would take nearly all of Rockstar, senior leadership included. GTA 6 sat on the shelf for a few years; the sources don't say how many.

Here the summaries differ. VGTimes says development began in 2015, while TheGamer says serious work only took off in 2018, as RDR2 was being finished. In our reading both can be true: 2015 was the start of research and planning, 2018 the start of real production. No source puts it that way.

The scope shrank from continents to "Miami and its surroundings", and the road also involved a change of faces: after RDR2 several big names left, Dan Houser among them, and Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker came to share the leadership of development. On Houser, we already ran a piece on what he says he avoids watching of the game.

Jason and Lucia since 2019

From what the sources say, by the end of 2019 the core of the game existed: the couple Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, the satire, the open world, the car theft and the shootouts. What took years was everything around it. Then came the pandemic: a team at home, performance capture halted, hiring so fast that it strained communication, and some senior designers leaving, tired of the lack of progress, according to Bloomberg.

Nelson said he understood the frustration of people watching the project fail to come together. He said nobody had complained to him directly about indecision, but he knew the complaints existed, and argued that a single leader can be just as slow and changeable as a shared leadership. Hooker described development as long stretches where nothing works, with occasional glimpses of what the game could be. By 2022, he said, enough pieces were in place to see the whole.

VGTimes includes a scene that explains why he stuck with it: while testing an internal build, Hooker played for hours past a story mission as random events chained together, a road-rage incident, a store robbery and a police chase. The same systems logic shows up in the Jason and Lucia relationship, which Nelson said required complex AI of the traditional game-development kind, not generative AI (per Polygon, cited by GamerFuzion).

The team: from 2,441 to 4,711

When RDR2 shipped in 2018, Rockstar had 2,441 employees. In August 2026, according to Bloomberg, it has 4,711 across 12 offices. GamerFuzion breaks that into 4,020 in development and QA and 690 in publishing; that adds up to 4,710, one short of the stated total, so we treat the figures as ranges rather than exact accounting.

What inflated the payroll most, per DualShockers and Polygon, was writing and animating non-player characters. Nelson called the projections alarming. The answer was a new Los Angeles studio dedicated to NPCs, with writers, producers and directors.

The delays, with no villain

GTA 6 was announced for 2025 in December 2023, moved to May 26, 2026 and then to November 19, 2026. According to DualShockers there was no single crisis, just many moving parts that didn't come together fast enough. Hooker says Rockstar could have kept the original date, but with a different game from the one it wanted to make.

Jennifer Kolbe, head of publishing, said she called Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick twice to tell him about the delays. His first reaction was disbelief, but he understood once the reasons were explained. Kolbe said Rockstar is lucky to have a reasonable publisher, since many teams are simply told to ship. The November 19 date is unchanged.

How much did it cost?

Rockstar hasn't disclosed the budget. Kolbe dismissed the rumor of more than $1.5 billion without giving the real figure. To Schreier, it is almost certainly the most expensive game ever made, and Bloomberg's estimate is that the cost could be more than double the roughly $500 million other publishers try to stay under. That estimate is Bloomberg's, not Rockstar's.

VGTimes adds that analysts expect 40 million copies on PlayStation and Xbox and more than $3 billion in four months. Those are market projections, not Rockstar data, and they differ from the ones we have already published: analysts project 48 million copies at launch. They measure different things and don't directly contradict each other.

Leaks and security

Garbut described the September 2022 leak, which exposed about 90 videos of an in-development build (VGTimes says "dozens"), as deeply invasive, like someone rummaging through your dirty laundry. Remote work ended in April 2024, and Kolbe explained that the security team was uneasy about the game being built in so many places. GamesIndustry.biz, via GamerFuzion, notes that Rockstar is now dealing with another, ongoing leak; for that one, see the CYBERLEEK case.

Only VGTimes mentions the labor dispute: 34 employees fired, most of them tied to union organizing, according to the former staff; the company says they shared confidential information on a Discord server. The case is reportedly being heard in Glasgow, with a ruling expected in late October. We didn't find this in the other summaries, so it rests on a single source.

And the next game?

The executives said the next project won't take eight years. Hooker says the engine, tools and team built for GTA 6 let them move faster, with more lateral changes than upward ones. Garbut says they rebuilt much of the technology and don't plan to tear it apart again. Rockstar hasn't named or announced another game.

What the report doesn't include

In the sources we read, there are no story details, no GTA Online information and no PC date. The PC question remains open.