Rockstar finally opened up about building GTA 6: 4,711 staff, a scrapped two-continent map, and the two-hour detour that convinced the team they'd made something special.
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Rockstar finally opened up about building GTA 6: 4,711 staff, a scrapped two-continent map, and the two-hour detour that convinced the team they'd made something special.
For over a decade, Rockstar said almost nothing about how GTA 6 was actually being built. Then, five weeks before launch, publishing head Jennifer Kolbe and the game's three development leads sat down with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier in Edinburgh — and the dam finally broke.
The feature, published October 14 in Bloomberg Businessweek, is the first time Rockstar has openly discussed the struggle behind GTA 6. The original plan was far wilder than what we're getting, and one accidental two-hour detour convinced the team they'd made something special.
Rockstar employed 2,441 people when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018. By August 2026, Bloomberg reports that had nearly doubled to 4,711 across 12 offices — bigger than any direct competitor. Head of development Rob Nelson said the team projected how many NPCs Leonida would need, looked at its capacity, and found the gap "horrifying." The answer: a whole new Los Angeles studio of writers, producers, and directors whose only job is NPCs.
| GTA 6 Development | Figure | |---|---| | Rockstar staff (2018, RDR2 launch) | 2,441 | | Rockstar staff (Aug 2026) | 4,711 | | Growth | +93% (nearly doubled) | | Studios worldwide | 12 | | New LA studio focus | NPCs only |
Here's the one that rewrites GTA history: GTA 6 started life as Project Americas, aiming to feature big swaths of land across both North and South America. Not a bigger Vice City — a two-continent crime epic.
That scope later narrowed to Leonida and its Miami-inspired hub. The game still slipped twice, from May to November 2026, and Phil Hooker admitted an earlier release was possible — it just wouldn't have matched the team's vision. "Even within the last few months, we've changed things," he said.
Part of the delay came from Red Dead Redemption 2: its scope pulled senior staff away for years, and veterans including co-founder Dan Houser left after it shipped.
The best story in the interview isn't a number — it's a detour. Late in development, Hooker set off for a story mission in a test build and never arrived. A fender bender became a roadside argument. A pedestrian's insult became a fight. An unattended till became a robbery. A police chase, a stolen car, and a raid on a compound later, a fence handed him a new lead. Two hours had passed.
He says everyone left that review convinced that if they held their nerve, they had something special. That anecdote explains the NPC studio, the headcount, and the delays: Leonida is built to interrupt you.
It also shows where GTA 6 sits between its predecessors: Red Dead Redemption 2 told a more nuanced story than GTA 5, and GTA 6 leans toward Red Dead while balancing the two. You can still throw $20 bills at strippers, but the game also wants you to empathize with its Bonnie-and-Clyde-inspired leads. Building a game around two people whose bond ebbs and flows with player choices took years of work on traditional AI — "the traditional kind, not ChatGPT," as Schreier put it. More in our characters guide.
On crunch, Kolbe was blunt: "We're not going to finish this game by crunching." She cited more staff, revised planning, and extra pay or time off for extra hours — while admitting experiences may differ. Schreier reports largely positive staff views, but in a studio of 4,711 people, "largely positive" and "experiences may differ" can both be true.
Security is the sorer subject. After the 2022 leaks, Rockstar required five days a week in the office from 2024 and blocked tool access from home. Then the August 2026 "CyberLeek" leak happened anyway, raising doubts about whether the policy works.
Then there's the 2025 firing of 34 employees, most part of a group trying to unionize. Rockstar says they shared confidential information; the group disputes that, and the tribunal case was expected to resolve at the end of October. Kolbe called the talks positive: "If they want a union, they will have a union."
First, the money question Rockstar won't answer. Kolbe shot down the rumor that GTA 6 cost more than $1.5 billion — the price of Dubai's Burj Khalifa — but Schreier writes it is almost certainly the most expensive game ever made, possibly more than double the roughly $500 million other publishers stay under.
Whatever the figure, you'll pay the same at the till:
| Edition | Price | Format | |---|---|---| | Standard | $79.99 | Physical + Digital | | Ultimate | $99.99 | Digital only | Analysts forecast around 40 million copies and more than $3 billion in the first four months — an estimate, not a Rockstar promise. The same week, Rockstar dropped the launch trailer on October 15. Start planning your first drive with our Leonida map guide.
Here's what the numbers actually mean: Rockstar spent 8 years and nearly doubled its workforce to build a game that started as a two-continent epic and ended as a single-state crime story. That's not scope creep — it's scope discipline. The Project Americas cut suggests Rockstar chose depth over breadth: a Leonida that interrupts you for two hours is worth more than two continents you rush through.
The 4,711 headcount also reframes the delay. This wasn't a game that slipped because it was in trouble. It slipped because Rockstar kept adding people to make the world denser, not to fix a broken game. The two-hour detour story proves it — Hooker wasn't testing a broken build, he was getting lost in a finished one.
Rockstar's October 8 Newswire reveal gave us six GTA 6 radio stations with celebrity hosts — Bad Bunny, Burna Boy, Kerry King and more — plus the series' first on-demand podcasts. Here's every station and playlist detail confirmed so far.
