The world has been spoiled with a bevy of Grand Theft Auto 6 news (and leaks) recently, though it’s much rarer to get a behind-the-scenes look at the actual development of the game. Fans think they know why the game took so long to make, and Rockstar has hinted at some of the reasons as well. Only now, midway through October 2026, has the public finally gotten a true sense of the issues Rockstar was facing as it put together the biggest video game of all time.
A new Bloomberg feature by reporter Jason Schreier dives into the nitty-gritty of GTA 6‘s development, and it’s an eye-opener. There are aspects anyone could guess: fan expectations are astronomical, and Rockstar doesn’t want to disappoint anyone. Yes, Rockstar took many “research” trips across Florida to visit all the areas the game would depict. Visiting a club was extremely necessary for Rockstar to nail a party’s lighting, characters, animations, music, and drinks. All of this has been described before in older previews, but we’ve learned some new tidbits about the game’s development woes as well.
GTA 6 started as a different game
Prior to Bloomberg’s report, there were rumors that GTA 6 began as a project with multiple protagonists that sprawled across North and South America. This so-called Project Americas has now been officially confirmed by Rockstar — and also helps explain some of the delay. GTA 6 began too ambitiously, and the unrealistic scope meant that the developer had to push the game back by several years.
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GTA 6’s realism was tricky
It’s easy to marvel at all the tiny details in the trailers and screenshots shared by Rockstar, but these don’t really communicate how difficult it was to narrow down that minutia. Co-studio head Rob Nelson told Bloomberg that the studio knew that impressive graphics would inherently make players expect realism, but the team struggled to define how that would play out in the game. As an example, Nelson described the simple act of drinking a beer. Would players need to shop for alcohol? Would players need to get up, open the fridge, grab the beer, and manually open the bottle? How far into the weeds would each individual mechanic get?
These sound like silly questions, but they were critical to answer — both for scope and to find the fun. This may be why GTA 6 includes Red Dead Development’s intricate beard customization but does not require players to wait until Jason grows the hair.
Complicating matters further: much of the game was unfinished, so design decisions required a lot of “guesswork,” according to Bloomberg. Once the ideas were settled, building the “complicated artificial intelligence systems” still took years of additional work.
The pandemic and Rockstar’s work environment
Rockstar says that productivity and progress were difficult during the period of development when workers stayed at home. Some aspects of video game development simply aren’t possible without gathering people in the same location. Rockstar developers couldn’t just jury-rig a high-quality performance capture system at home, and if they could, they’d still need other humans to do the performance. Due to privacy concerns, workers at home also weren’t allowed to access Rockstar’s servers and tools. While reports suggest that productivity rises with remote work, it’s easy to see how such constraints would hamper progress.
Another unexpected hurdle for Rockstar was its development structure. The report details a framework with three head of development supervisors, each of whom brought their own hesitations, or worse, conflicting ideas. Nelson says that workers weren’t fans of this hierarchy, but he also asserts that similar complaints still arise even when games are made by a single leader.
There are three of the most prominent reasons behind GTA 6‘s unwieldy development, but the report contains many juicy nuggets worth reading in full here.