He acknowledged that, while they are great games, you can’t really make something like a new Grand Theft Auto with a budget of $10 million. He noted that the industry needs games of all kinds and expressed hope that the industry doesn’t jump on the AA game bandwagon in the future.

“You do hear, after the success of things like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that the AA games are taking over,” he said. “But I would not be able to live without a AAA title. I really want to play the blockbuster games. You can’t do GTA for $10 million. We need both. It’s important not to get stuck in ideas, like AA is a new thing, or indie is a new thing, or ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a new thing. We need the diversity. I hope that publishers don’t just look at a game like Expedition, which has been super successful, and think, ‘oh, AA is a new thing. Let’s only do that.’ I don’t believe in that. You had a huge amount of AA games that came this year, which nobody cared about. Let’s remember that.”

When the concept of risk vs reward came up, with Dring noting that it’s often harder for games with AAA budgets to take major risks, Fares brought up studios like Naughty Dog that are using their massive budgets to push the creative envelope in different ways. He argued that it is possible to develop AAA games that also take risks to a certain extent. He did, however, acknowledge that incredibly large budgets (for example, $100 million) might make risk-taking a more difficult proposition for companies.

“I would argue that, actually, Naughty Dog is pushing the envelope of innovation with a AAA budget,” he counters. “I would argue Rockstar is doing it. Nintendo is, most of the time, doing it. So you can do a big AAA title but also take innovative risks. But once you go over a $100 million budget, you’re going to be like, ‘okay, s***. There’s a lot of money on the table’. People are more scared. It’s understandable. But it’s proven that you can do it.”

Fares spoke about how his own studio, Hazelight Studios, likes to take risks. He noted that the studio’s ethos is to “f*** s*** up” while still being careful about the responsibilities towards its employees.

“The f*** s*** up mentality, without f***ing up, is important, because we take things to the next level,” he said. “We can explore. If you are limited, because of risk and being scared, it’s not good for the game. So, for us, it will always be like that, whatever the budget.”

“With that said, obviously, there’s a responsibility. People need money to pay the rent, and there’s a responsibility to who’s paying for the budget, and to actually deliver the milestone, to do a great game, to not slack, to do something really well.”

Split Fiction is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. For more details, check out our review.

He added, “You needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters.”

Houser framed Grand Theft Auto’s identity as a commentary on American life – politics, media, consumerism, crime, mythmaking, and suggested that transplanting that tone wholesale to other countries would change the series at a fundamental level. “It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective…It wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.”

The comments also help explain why GTA’s rare detour to the UK remained a one-off. While Rockstar’s cities have long been fictionalized riffs on New York and Los Angeles, the studio has kept its creative focus on the uniquely American mix that fuels the series’ commentary and outlandish characters.

Bottom line: Houser’s observation underscores how deeply Grand Theft Auto is woven into the fabric of American identity. The series doesn’t just use America as a backdrop; it thrives on its depiction. Relocating the game outside the U.S. would mean dismantling that framework and rebuilding it for a culture with different social tensions, institutions, and myths.

Speaking to Lex Fridman, former Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser said it’s the fact that each new title always feels different. While the gap between releases is a factor, the development team avoids rushing out a new entry.

“I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different, you know, people have very strong feelings. ‘I like this one. I didn’t like that one as much.’ Because they are pretty different.”

Not that Rockstar is trying to hide the core appeal of the franchise, i.e. embodying a criminal or three and going absolutely wild in a massive sandbox. But how it goes about that feels different each time.

“It’s a Grand Theft Auto, you know, it’s going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it’s going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So, I think the way the IP kept evolving made people really excited to play it.”

Marketing also plays a big part. “We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you really felt like you’re already in the product just because you’d seen the trailers and stuff,” says Houser.

Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on May 26th, 2026, for Xbox Series X/S and PS5. It will be the first game in the series’ history that doesn’t feature any writing or characters by Houser.

“We have to protect our intellectual property, but more than that, we have to be mindful of others. If you create intellectual property with AI, it’s not protectable.”

What if the technology had all constraints removed on its usage? “Could we push a button tomorrow and create an equivalent to the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ marketing plan?” said Zelnick. “The answer is no. A, you can’t do that yet, and B, I am of the view that you wouldn’t end up with anything very good. You end up with something pretty derivative.”

This is primarily due to the “backward-looking” nature of AI and its processing of older information, which could be ideal for, say, disease research. However, such an approach is at odds with creating a rich narrative universe that titles like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption are known for.

“Anything that involves backward-looking data compute, it’s really good for that, and that applies to lots of things. What we do at Take-Two, anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at,” said Zelnick.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped other companies from investing in AI, especially Electronic Arts, which has allegedly pushed developers for about a year now to integrate the technology. Microsoft has also received pushback for its investment in OpenAI, though it insists there’s no mandate to use it in game development. As Halo: Campaign Evolved director Greg Hermann recently noted, “It really is about that creative spark that comes from people and improving just overall workflows.”

As for the current Grand Theft Auto, namely Grand Theft Auto 6, it’s launching on May 26th, 2026, for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Previously slated for this year, it faced a delay for more polish. Check out the latest trailer here.

Driving in GTA 4 is Annoying

Driving is an important aspect of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and GTA 4 is no different. Liberty City is filled with vehicles for players to purchase and steal. With this title, Rockstar strove for realism and this extends to the handling of vehicles.

Unfortunately, the result is that cars feel like they’re slipping on ice, and they sway far too much. It’s a damper on gameplay, and it makes driving from point A to B a tedious task. The problem also rears its ugly head when attempting to escape from the police, as weaving through traffic almost invariably results in collisions. Luckily, this issue was addressed in GTA 5.

Interestingly enough, however, that doesn’t seem to be something that Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive is interested in. Responding to a question about a potential GTA film during Take-Two’s recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said that making a movie is generally a much riskier venture than making a game, and given the lower chances of success and sufficient returns on investment, the company doesn’t feel greenlighting a movie would be worth the effort.

“[Films and television are] very difficult businesses,” Zelnick said (transcription via PC Gamer). “I’ve been in them successfully. They’re super challenging. They’re not what we do. We’d much prefer the risk/reward profile of the business we’re in.”

He added: “The hit ratios in the motion picture business are vastly lower than they are in the interactive entertainment business. Our hit ratios for console properties are in the 80% or 90%. The hit ratio for a well-run movie studio is around 30%, which is to say there’s a 70% chance that the movie that we license could fail.

“And so in success, the number, in terms of the benefit to our bottom line… it’s not zero, but it’s not really material to what we do around here. And in failure, we run the risk of compromising the underlying intellectual property.”

Of course, it’s not like the Grand Theft Auto franchise isn’t making enough money for Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games as it is. GTA 5, for instance, has now shipped a whopping 190 million units worldwide. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto 6 is due to be officially unveiled next month– though it might not launch until 2025, if rumours are to be believed.

The report indicates that the company is trying to expand its video game offerings beyond smaller mobile games, and that Netflix has seemingly “discussed plans” to release a game in the Grand Theft Auto franchise on its own platform with Take-Two Interactive, which owns the Grand Theft Auto IP.

An analyst has revealed that Netflix has reportedly spent around $1 billion in its attempts at bringing gaming to its platform so far, and there don’t seem to be any indications that the company will be slowing down.

In recent news for the next major Grand Theft Auto title, the Australian Classification website had seemingly rated Grand Theft Auto 6 for release with an MA15+ rating, which is quite a bit more lenient than the MA18+ rating for Grand Theft Auto 5.

The headline rumour emerging from this report is that the game will feature a playable female protagonist – the first for a 3D Grand Theft Auto title. Secondly, the report states the game will take place in Miami; obviously, we know as Grand Theft Auto fans this’ll mean Rockstar’s fictionalised version of Miami, Vice City. Elsewhere, this rumour has strength: the ‘Lil Probe Inn’ visitable in San Andreas in the remastered GTA Trilogy features pictures on its wall of known settings within Rockstar games, with UFO’s circling overhead. Now, there’s a location which has been added to the Definitive Edition which doesn’t belong – a simple suburban house flanking palm trees. One eagle-eyed player has likened this house to a real-world location in Palm Beach County Florida. To be fair, the real-world location is immensely similar. Plus, Vice City hasn’t yet received the revamp Liberty City and San Andreas has, so surely Vice City is the chosen location for the next GTA game. Maybe we can take this one as a given.

Sticking with discussing the game’s setting a little while longer, there were strong rumours circa 2020 that GTA 6 would encompass a Godfather Part II style multi-generational story; it’d be a plot that jumps between a modern-day setting – say, Vice City – and a fictionalised South American city like Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s or 80s. Now, this sounds cool. Spending time with characters to explore their origins and how their choices affect the modern day sounds like an awesome narrative structure. However, Bloomberg’s report has put ice on this rumour by explicitly stating past rumours of multi-locations in GTA 6 have been shelved by Rockstar in an effort to best manage the workload of its employees.

Rockstar has a chequered history with crunch. Reports of employees working upwards of 100-hour weeks – testimony from Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, no less – has been vehemently refuted by employees, who’ve taken to their social media pages to deny they’ve ever had to work such gargantuan hours. Whatever the reality, Rockstar are making concerted effort to evolve its workplace culture. That workplace environment churned out some of the most sharp-witted story on modern day society seen in video games, of course, whilst also taking cheap shots at pretty much every vulnerable demographic and marginalised community in the process.

Either way, no more will GTA use humour to punch down. The re-release of GTA 5 on current-gen hardware has already removed its outdated offensive humour, which surely is a sign of the restraint to come. Together with the rumours of female protagonists and crunch-less development, aided by large-scale highly ambitious projects being reeled in to maintain worker harmony, the cultural shifts taking place within Rockstar are evidently feeding into GTA 6’s development. This feature’s talk of awesome multi-generational storylines across two fully realised cities is secondary to employee welfare. Providing GTA 6 is created by a happy workforce, the end-product will be worthwhile.

The knock-on effect of course is the game is taking longer to develop, with release date rumours pointing towards 2023 at the earliest, but most likely 2024 before it’s out. As per Bloomberg’s report, Rockstar won’t halt development after GTA 6’s release though. No, it’s game world will dynamically shift and evolve as further means to mitigate employee crunch. This methodology benefits players too, of course, with a frequently updating game world providing new missions to complete and fresh locations to explore. In essence, it’s a replication of the strategy they’re employing to great effect on Grand Theft Auto Online. Now, of course this won’t be music to the ears of everyone, for this methodology does bear the hallmarks of a live service game. There’re plenty who’ll demand a compellingly crafted single player narrative for GTA 6, so whilst reports of reeling in employee crunch are very much needed, it shouldn’t come at the expense of a well-realised, fully immersive story.

And what of the story rumours? Well, back to the female player character, she’ll purportedly be Latina who’s one half of a Bonnie and Clyde style duo. The depression-era bank robbers, whilst clearly nasty pieces of work in real life, do provide an intriguing template for a story. Players of Grand Theft Auto obviously make peace with the requirement to kill innocent people but owing to Bonnie and Clyde being lovers there’s definitely scope for emotional heft in GTA 6’s story, if indeed it is modelled on their exploits.

Obviously, exasperatingly, there’re detractors to GTA 6’s purported female protagonist. Naysayers reckon a female player character is nothing more than a political choice, a decision borne purely out of Rockstar’s desire to soften its cultural image. It’s box ticking, they say. Those who relate GTA 6’s differences to Rockstar pursuing agendas are mere reactionaries who wish to deny change. The fact Rockstar are allegedly featuring a playable female character is reflective of society’s evolution, and of its growing inclusivity.

This isn’t to say that the wholesale changes in Rockstar personnel, softened corporate image, and development changes which maybe hint towards live service aren’t cause for concern. Grand Theft Auto is one of the most famous video game franchises, with millions of fans worldwide. Those most passionate just want to experience the next wonderful entry in the storied franchise; any criticism, by and large, is expressed through love. Accusing Rockstar of simply not caring anymore, frankly, does no one any good. Rockstar wouldn’t undergo the seismic challenge of shifting their internal culture if they didn’t care. Let’s all collectively, if we can, try to maintain a little faith.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition has sold well above anyone’s expectations with a grand total of 10 million units shipped, despite all of its overwhelmingly negative critical reception and troubled launch. Take-Two says the game “significantly exceeded expectations” where sales are concerned, in line with previous recent comments.

Meanwhile, the perennial seller Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 160 million units (which is a bump of 5 million units since its sales at the end of the previous quarter), and with the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions slated for release next month, sales are sure to get a substantial boost once again.

Finally, the entire franchise lifetime sales stand at the 370 million+ units mark, just a bit shy of Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise (which stands at 380 million units sold).

Rockstar has officially confirmed that the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise is in active development- read more on that through here.

Johnson and Waterson were joking about adding a tank to the game (something that the game apparently wasn’t meant to support). Both tinkered with the game’s system and placed a pedestrian (who could shoot in 8 different directions) on top of a car, and then slowed the car’s speed down by some margin and increased the bullet damage to provide a authentic feel to the experience.

“The premise was that there was a vehicle code that we could use,” Waterson said, “and there was also a ballistics code that allowed a rotating pedestrian to shoot bullets in eight directions. Our idea was that if you put a pedestrian on top of a car, and made the car go slower and massively increased the damage of the bullets, then you’ve got a basic version of a tank.”

Once the office was empty, both pushed this code into the game, which testers found really enjoyable, and as such, it became a part of the final release.

“A bunch of testers and team mates who had gotten in early were playing with the tanks. And they were having an absolute blast, literally,” he said.

“Whilst we had to conform to some accepted norms in game design, that core kernel of absolute mayhem – wanton destruction – was forced into the game by the teams who controlled those key parts,” he added. “We would fight to try and get a chance to make it happen, and if it got turned down, we’d just ****ing do it anyway.”

The original DMA Design-developed Grand Theft Auto was originally meant to be a driving game called Race’n’Chase, which after numerous experiments like this one morphed into what was a rudimentary crime simulator that would, of course, go on to become one of the most valuable franchises in the history of video games.