While Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser had left the studio all the way back in 2020, he has only now revealed more details about his decision to leave. In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Houser noted that the sheer scale of Rockstar’s games, and the development time required of this scale, played a major part in his decision.
Houser noted that Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 – the last two titles he worked on at the studio – were already incredibly massive in scale. Eventually, he got fatigued with working on games of this scale, especially when it comes to just how long they take to develop.
“The scale of the last couple [GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2] were beyond any imagining,” Houser explained. “I worked with incredibly talented people so thinking that group, me piggybacking off their vast brains, could do something amazing – that’s why I worked there.”
“The projects were really long and tough and take a long time to make,” he continued. “It can be a tough journey getting things at that scale with that many moving parts finished. You’ve got 450,000 lines of dialogue, and [an] equal number of parts of other things all trying to assemble itself. It’s this huge production experience.” He also went on to note that working on games of this scale ultimately “swallows all of your time for many years at a time. I don’t know if I had another one of those games in me.”
Rockstar Games’ last major release was Red Dead Redemption 2 all the way back in 2018. Since then, the studio has been working on Grand Theft Auto 6, which will also end up being the first game in the franchise since the release of 2013’s GTA 5. Houser’s statement about these titles taking incredibly long amounts of time certainly sound reasonable when taking these titles into account.
It is worth noting, however, that Rockstar Games of the 2000s had quite a different release cadence, with the Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas trilogy all having come out between 2001 and 2004. Along with this, the studio also worked on several other titles, including a variety of GTA spin-offs like Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories and Chinatown Wars, as well as full-fledged sequels like Grand Theft Auto 4.
Game development, however, has seen quite a few changes since then. Owing to the fact that games have been expected to be much more complex while also offering high-fidelity visuals since then, the process of developing new games has started taking even the biggest studios much longer. One can simply look at Naughty Dog for a similar example, where the studio used to release games at a much quicker cadence, but eventually slowing down around the time it started working on titles for the PS4.
For more details about Houser and his time at Rockstar Games, check out who his favourite characters so far have been. In the meantime, Rockstar Games has confirmed plans to release Grand Theft Auto 6 on November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
