While Grand Theft Auto 6 will undoubtedly be one of the biggest game releases the industry has seen when it comes out on May 26, 2026, it is worth noting that the title has also likely been incredibly expensive to develop. A former technical lead from Rockstar Games – Obbe Vermeij – believes that the next game in the franchise – a hypothetical Grand Theft Auto 7 – will likely end up being cheaper to develop than GTA 6 was thanks to modern tools like AI.
“GTA 7 will be cheaper to make than GTA 6,” said Vermiej in an interview with Kiwi Talks. Vermiej, who has previously worked on previous games in the GTA franchise, went on to joke about how “We’ll have to wait for 15 years to see if we’re right or not.”
“I would imagine that…Let’s say you do a cutscene, you could just, all the characters in the cutscene could just be rendered by an AI including the conversation if you just describe the scene,” he said. “That could be your first pass of a cutscene. You’ll still have artists to do like the higher level creative stuff, and there will be glitches to fix and all that stuff, but I think the bulk of the work is probably going to be replaced.”
When asked about how this would work for programmers, Vermiej spoke about how the march of technology has also changed the role of programmers during game development. He brought up how a game engine used to be responsible for rendering visuals, and programmers had to work on other aspects of a game. These days, however, many of the things programmers used to have to work on separately have been folded into the engine itself.
“That’s already been basically happening for programmers all through the years,” he explained. “When we started GTA 3, an engine was just a rendering part, but the programmers would still write the physics and the collision detection, and, you know, animation code and all that stuff have been sort of removed from the individual projects, and it’s now part of the engine, right? Whether it’s Unity, Unreal or Rage. So there’s already tons of work that programmers used to do that’s now not being done anymore.”
“When I started, programmers were about a third of a typical team, and now it’s maybe 10, 15 percent. So, it’s already happened to programmers. And now, with AI, there’s still going to be even more work automated.”
Considering the length of time between mainline releases in the GTA series, early work on GTA 6 likely started quite some time ago. Back in May, Take-Two Interactive revealed that “earnest” development on GTA 6 only really started back in 2020. The use of the word “earnest” is likely a way to refer to the game entering full production after having wrapped up its pre-production work.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is in development for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
