Grand Theft Auto VI Took 8 Years and Doubled Rockstar to 4,711 Staff, Heads Tell Bloomberg

Grand Theft Auto 6‘s co-heads of development, Phil Hooker and Aaron Garbut, told Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in a lengthy making-of feature published today that the studio’s next game won’t repeat GTA 6’s eight-year build cycle. Both pointed to the engine, tools, and team built for GTA 6 as the foundation for shorter cycles on whatever comes next.

The feature puts concrete numbers on what GTA 6 cost the studio. Rockstar has grown from 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018 to 4,711 across 12 offices by 2026. Most of that headcount (4,020 of 4,711) sits in development and QA. The studio also now runs publishing as a separate function, with 690 staff in that group.

Hooker said the build of GTA 6 leaves a foundation in place: “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly.” Garbut added that the studio isn’t going to dismantle what it built: “We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project. But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”

GTA 6 was first announced in December 2023 with a 2025 launch target, then moved to May 2026 and finally to its confirmed November 19, 2026 release date. Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, handled the two delay calls with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. According to Kolbe, Zelnick’s first reaction to the second delay was “Please tell me you’re kidding,” though he came around once she explained why.

The Bloomberg feature also walks through Rockstar’s leak history. A 2022 “network intrusion” leaked 90 in-development clips. A separate hacker group has been circulating footage since August and has threatened to release the full game. Garbut called the early-leak experience “really weirdly invasive” and said Rockstar’s response was to end remote work in April 2024.

Rockstar’s GTA release cadence

RPS’s coverage points out that GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and GTA 4 shipped across a seven-year window with a much smaller staff:

Our read: Rockstar is making a concrete commitment, not just a polite one. They are saying the GTA 6 engine and 4,020-person development team are reusable assets, not a one-off. That is a real change in how the studio talks about its next project: the R&D phase for GTA 6 was effectively the R&D for whatever comes next. The comparison against the GTA 3-era cadence also shows how Rockstar grew up: the studio went from 4 games in 7 years (per RPS) with a smaller team to GTA VI in 2026 (per Bloomberg) with 4,711 staff. The promise of a shorter cycle next time is partly the math working out: a second title on the same engine reuses the cost.

This Bloomberg interview lines up with our earlier GTA 6 PC version reportedly slated for Q1 2027 and our GTA 6 launch prep guide from earlier this fall, both of which assumed the November 19 console date would hold.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report