If you want to know how big Grand Theft Auto 6 really is, both as a video game and as a pop culture phenomenon, you got to look at the numbers. Developer Rockstar Games global production team has surpassed 4,700 full-time roles. That is nearly five times the size of the team that made Grand Theft Auto 5. Grand Theft Auto 6's budget has soared past video games and even blockbuster films with a rumored cost around $1.5 billion. That's roughly the cost of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet. And as GTA 6's release in November approaches, used PlayStation 5 Pros are selling for $1,500. That is more than doubled the cost of a new PS5 Pro at launch just 2 years ago. And yes, that price increase has to do with RAM. But it also reflects that people are willing to pay a bonkers amount of cash to play GTA 6 on maximum settings. How did Rockstar create this pop culture phenomenon? And where will they take it next? I spoke with the one reporter who has the answers. Welcome to Post Games, a podcast about how and why we love video games. I am your host, Chris Plant, and today I am joined by Bloomberg's Jason Shrier. Just a few weeks ago, he visited Rockstar Games's headquarters in Edinburgh to interview the many creative leads responsible for the first Grand Theft Auto in 12 years. And just this week, he published his cover story at Bloomberg, sharing what he learned from that trip. What follows is a nittygritty conversation about GTA 6 in which we dig into the business of the game and its creation and also what we know about the game itself. We chat about the behindthe-scenes leadership changes, Rockstar's just humongous global staffing and the company's response to crunch and efforts at unionization. We also talk about just how strange and inventive this video game appears to be. why the creative team continues to mess with its formulas rather than repeat what works and what players can actually expect from not just this game, but potential expansions and follow-ups. Spoilers, you might not need to wait so long for more GTA. We'll get to that a little bit later. Shrier is one of my favorite guests, and he's always sure to bring bits of the story that didn't make the cut for the written version. So, you're going to want to hear this one top to bottom. This week on Post Games, behind the scenes of Grand Theft Auto 6 with Jason Shrier. Act one, the billiondollar business of GTA 6. Act two, a taste of the biggest game in the world. And a Patreon bonus, where Grand Theft Auto and video games go from here. And lastly, we got a song of the week that you want to stick around for. Hotel Hexopod by Shaun Bon. The song comes from the upcoming game floor plan, slap out of it. One last thing very quick before we get to the show. I just want to remind folks that if you enjoy the show and you want an adfree experience with bonus segments in every episode, including a great one in this one, and monthly bonus episodes digging into the histories of some of the most important video games of all time, like the recently released history of Grand Theft Auto 3, please consider checking out patreon.com/postgames. $5 a month gets you so much stuff and also it allows me to keep this show going in 2026. The best way to ensure good journalism happens is to pay for it. So that said, if you want to listen to the free feed, I'm certainly not going to say no to that. I appreciate y'all either way. Anyway, enough about the business. Let's get to the show. Act one, the billiondollar business of GTA 6. Jason Shrier is a reporter at Bloomberg, where he recently wrote the cover story on the making of Grand Theft Auto 6. Shrier also co-hosts the video game conversation podcast, Triple Click, with Matty Myers and Kirk Hamilton. Love it. And he writes books like Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and Press Reset. His latest book, Play Nice, tells the history of iconic mega developer Blizzard. You can read all those now, or if you prefer audio books, why not give them a listen? Here he is on the creation of GTA 6. Let's start with the business of making a game like Grand Theft Auto 6. Literally, some of the simplest questions are the hardest for me to find solid answers to. Like, when did this game actually begin development? Because I have read everything from 2014 to 2020. That's a six-year spread right there. I one of the answers has to be right. I can't tell you the whole story because you don't know this since we're recording in early October, but in mid October or so, I will have a big Bloomberg story out about business week story out. Bloomberg business week story out about the making of this game for which I went to Edinburgh and interviewed a bunch of the top Rockstar North developers and executives and they kind of walked me through all the ups and downs of the last, I don't know, 13 years since GTA 5 came out. But first, since we're getting into the business of it, just out of curiosity, I just want to pop a question for you. You might know this already, but off the top of your head, if you don't already know it, how many copies do you think GTA 5 has sold? I love asking people this question. >> It's like 130 million. >> 230 million. >> 230 million. There we go. Yeah. >> It's the best selling on mobile game of all time. >> I have big questions about that number. >> Do you? >> Sure. But does that number include every time it's appeared on like PlayStation Plus or been given away as a Epic Games deal or any of those things? >> No. Those are truly raw sales. >> Those are raw sales, but they include discounted copies. Like it was discounted for most of that. >> That means somebody like made an effort to buy it, which is a different thing than it just appeared, you know, YouTube style on your iPod. >> No, this is not free copies. This is and it was also on PS3, PS4, PS5. All three of those generations you could get like different version. I'm not sure. PS5 version might just be kind of a more of a remaster. PS4 was like a true quotequote nextG version and then there's a PC version. So, it's been it's been around. But yes, that number is mindboggling. Bestelling non-mobile game of all time. Minecraft is the bestselling game of all time, but that's on mobile. So, it doesn't it's kind of apples and oranges there, which I think that number is also kind of it helps explain the phenomenon that GTA 6 is going to be because there's never really been a follow-up to a game of this magnitude before. It's as if Minecraft 2 were about to come out. >> That's bonkers. So, when did it begin development? >> Okay, so to answer your question, so they first started having conversations about it very I mean, who even knows? I'm sure within Rockstar they were having conversations about it before GTA V even came out. I think that the time frame that they were giving me, Rob Nelson, who's kind of the head the top one of the top developers there, the top creative person there, um he was telling me that in 2015 is when they started taking their first research trips to Miami in preparation for creating Vice City. And that's when people started working on the map of the game, which is what they do first. They start kind of planning out what the world's going to look like. That is also when it was cenamed project Americas. I reported this on Bloomberg a few years ago in part or it was codenamed that because it was supposed to be North and South America and it was supposed to be big chunks of like the coastlines and stuff like that. That would later shrink down to just Florida and Miami and its surrounding areas and whatnot. Although I who knows if they stuck in some secret stuff like Warma and Red Dead 2 that they haven't told people about yet. Uh so 2015 and the idea was to develop that and Red Dead 2 concurrently. But at a certain point the top developers realized that Red Dead 2 to get their ambitions out was going to take the efforts of pretty much everybody including the top leadership team, the people who are kind of the inner circle of Rockstar, the people who are kind of steering direction from above. And so they all moved on to Red Dead 2. And their thinking was, well, look, we're doing all this cool ambitious new systemic stuff in Red Dead 2. We'll take a lot of that as the foundation to build and build off of it when we get back to GTA 6. So, they shipped that game at the end of 2018 and 2019 a bunch of people took time off and stuff. So, I would say like 2019 2020 is when it really started getting back into development. They told me that like throughout 2019, by the end of 2019, they had essentially decided on the story of this Bonnie and Clyde inspired crime couple, Jason and Lucia. So, that was really when it started solidifying. So, but that said, there have been artists, they told me, who have been at Rockstar working on GTA 6 since 2015. So, technically, some people have been working on it for 11 years, but really development didn't start until like 2019ish, 2020ish. The funny thing is you mentioned that they wanted to make sure these senior leadership, this inner circle would be available to make GTA 6. And from what I understand, several senior leaders from previous GTA games, basically the foundation of the series, have left. So where did they go and and who has stepped into that vacuum? >> Yeah, it's a good question. Rockstar is kind of unique. I've found and this is something that was kind of crystallized for me just from having these conversations when I went to Edinburgh a lot of most game studio or maybe not most but a lot of game studios a lot of big budget games have a single director and they're responsible for setting the vision your Neil Duckman's your Corey Barlas your Hideo Kojima Rockstar has never really had that they've had the Howers who are the co-founders of the studio who have always been creatively involved and Dan Hower especially has always been the lead writer on their names. Dan Howser is one of the ones who left. I'll get to that in a sec. But they've also had this kind of I use the word inner circle deliberately cuz it's this kind of it's this just kind of gang of of uh creative visionaries who each kind of have their own domain and they work together on a lot of these decisions and a lot of them have been there for decades. There's always been that kind of route. And granted, Dan and Sam, the two housesers, they always had more of a kind of, let's call it, more of a say or more of a kind of what they say goes. Essentially, they had veto power. They might get the final call, but it's always been a little bit more collaborative than the kind of driven development style. But I think it kind of has to be given the scope of the games that these guys are making because they're making these massive open worlds where even the people at in charge at the top don't know every single thing that's in their games. That said, yes. So after RDR2, Dan Hower left. That was a big deal. Imran Sarwire, who was the top designer on on GTA 5 and Red Dead 2, he also left. And what happened was these three guys, Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbett, and Phil Hooker, all got the title head of development. And there was this kind of this internal grumbling within Rockstar at that point that it was like decisions were getting really slow. There was indecision, there was conflicting decisions, too many cooks in the kitchen, we need a single person in charge. They pushed back against that. They said they were certainly aware of the grumbling, but I was talking to Nelson a lot about this and he was saying that not much in his job actually changed from RDR2 to GTA 5 despite the title change. He was saying that they did things kind of in similar ways that they did the last time. It's just that for GTA 6 in particular, what happened was they entered this process, this kind of dark period that a lot of game developers face of like finding the fun, figuring out what the game actually is going to be. And that dark period happened to line up with co which made it even more difficult. So his his argument is that that led to some problems. That said, I've also heard from developers more on the ground floor that they got a sense that there were just kind of conflicting decisions and things not like basically the gripes. So that's kind of their their two sides to this story. Of course, the management they they would disagree with the notion that it was like too many cooks in the kitchen, three-headed monster, etc., etc., But yeah, I mean it'll be really interesting to see what a GTA game not written by Dan Howser or not led by Dan Howser looks like because it might feel different or it could feel the same. I mean, there are a lot of people there who, like I said before, have been working on this game, this series for decades. And I think that's part of how Rockstar makes it work is that you have this kind of, I don't know, like Dutch Vanlin style gang of people who just like have learned to trust one another and just keep going for one last job over and over. Just got to trust. >> Well, that's why it's a miracle that there is any consistency between these games because they are so big. And the thing that I think about, this is about a different series, but I remember when I saw a preview of Assassin's Creed 3, and the director was there, and I asked him a question about some story stuff that was happening in the ship combat, and he looked at me and then just admitted, I have no idea what you're talking about. And that was a much smaller game, right? Like a much much smaller game, but it was being made in all these studios across the world. You mentioned the the sales numbers for GTA 5 to obviously match that with GTA 6. The staff numbers are also bonkers. How how big is the team for this game now? >> So, I have exact numbers and if people go check out the Bloomberg story, you'll see the exact numbers, which is >> 2018, Red Dead 2 ships, they have 24,441 employees, 24 hours, >> which is a ridiculous number of people making a video game. go even further. >> Yeah, this is across all of Rockstar. So, some of those are working on GTA online and whatnot, but yes, 2400 employees, let's say. >> Now, today they have 4711 employees, nearly 4,800, nearly double the staff across 12 offices across the world. Well, here here's what I don't understand about that is what I hear about video game development and specifically regarding open world games is that there is a ton of contractor work that there's a ton of outsourcing. So, should I assume that that is still happening on top of it? Like there was probably a multiplier there and all of the staff has been added. No, they do have a little bit of outsourcing they told me for like art and animation cleanup and localization support, but it's like about 100 people. So much much less than most AAA studios are doing. And the main reason for that is that they have hired a lot of what traditional game companies would outsource. They have a very significant presence in India. They have a Rockstar India office. India is a location where some other game developers might be outsourcing and Rockstar just has that studio as part of Rockstar. Walk me through like the macro and the micro here because this is so unusual. I mean that's just it's a ridiculous number of people across all the space and let's start at the at the at the macro. What would one studio in this group do versus the others? cuz I know there's Scotland, there's New York, there's California, there's India. What's the difference? >> Yeah, it depends. So like um for example, Rockstar North kind of has a little bit of everything. Rockstar North is in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's kind of the brain center of Rockland because it's where the top creative leadership are and also the head of publishing, Jen KBY. And so that is where a lot of the top decisions are being made, but also they have just kind of floors full of designers and programmers and animators and they have a small moap studio in their basement. So they have a lot of stuff there versus another studio like Rockstar Lincoln is almost entirely QA. Um they have a studio in Los Angeles that is dedicated to making NPCs and so it's just kind of like writers and directors and production support for just NPCs entirely NPCs. They built this out in 2023 or so. In New York, it's a lot of marketing and just kind of like admin work. And also, there's a mocap studio on Long Island. So, they have some a lot of mocap stuff in New York as well. So, it it really varies all over the place. So, there's some studios within Rockstar that are like dedicated to one or two disciplines or one or two fields and then there are others that are more a mix of everything. >> Okay. So, now we're going to go micro. Imagine that someone is working in the animation department or just the narrative department. How are they spending an average day working on a game when the scope is this large? >> Yeah, it depends. It depends when what phase of production you're in. But for most of it, I think it's a lot of just making stuff and then reviewing stuff and going over that stuff and making sure it's good and polishing it and getting approvals and iterating on it and making it better with a game like this. So, there's just so much stuff in it, so many things to do, so many little side missions and stores that you can go in and rob. One of the big kind of selling points of GTA 6 is that it has way more interiors than the last GTA game. So, there's a lot more stuff you can do, a lot more gyms and grocery stores and diners and whatnot. So, that's a big part of it is just making stuff and filling up the world as much as possible. And then yeah, I mean that's that in and of itself is just a hercu herculan task. And then just making it all making sure things actually work together and function and probably endless numbers of review meetings with different layers of production and management to to make sure everything is working and heading in the right direction. But a lot of I mean one of the things I found I think this got removed from the final piece but I'll share it with you because I think it's interesting is like I came into Rockstar having done some reporting on Rockstar but never really having an opportunity to interview their top people on the record or anything like that. And so I was really curious to hear like what is it like making games at Rockstar? What are the challenges they run into? And it all just sounded like every other game company just on a bigger scale, like with way more money. Like every single problem they were telling me about, like struggles communicating to the entire team, struggles finding the fun, trying to figure out what the game was actually going to be, experimenting with things to see what would work, kind of technological issues, tools issues, like all of this stuff is just the same exact problems I hear about at other game companies. It's just that Rockstar spends 10 times as much money as even the biggest uh uh other game company. Maybe not 10 times as much. Uh well, maybe Well, no. If you're I don't think they spent I couldn't get an exact number out of them but uh they told me they spent less than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which is uh one $ one.5 billion which doesn't quite narrow it down but I think it's safe to say that this is the most expensive game ever made. Oh my gosh. I love that as speaking of wide ranges between zero dollars and Burj Khalifa, you could kind of land anywhere. >> This is talking about like an internet rumor that it was cost more than the bridge. Like that was like a Tik Tok thing like one of those, you know, Instagram things where it's like GTA 5 will cost more than the Birkha. >> I can already picture like the dollars being stacked up alongside the building with like a shitty AI animation. >> Exactly. Exactly. See, you're an expert on social media. >> I'm I'm a pro. I'm a pro. You you you said that basically everything happening here feels representative of what's happening elsewhere. I do want to talk about the crunch because in 2018 you wrote a story ran at Kotaku. You reported on Rockstar's culture of Crunch specifically then in the context of Red Dead Redemption 2. What was the culture like then and how is it changed now if at all? And I'll just put a little lantern here. We're gonna talk about the union stuff too. So feel free to loop that in however you want. >> Yeah. So I spent a bunch of time talking to Jen Colby who is the head of publishing at Rockstar about this stuff. I had actually talked to her in 2018 in New York when I was doing that Red Dead 2 crunch story. She was much less defensive in 2026 than she was in 2018. And in fact, she told me, she hadn't said this back then, but she told me when I was talking to her this time, that on Red Dead 2, even before the public Firestorm, she and other people at the company have been talking to each other and saying, "We can't keep doing things this way. Like things need to change in our organization and the way we approach Crunch." And she told me basically, "We're not doing it again." Like this is the quote that she used. and she said, I am going to read an exact line from her and this is from my Bloomberg story. Quote, "It's not been perfect, but it's certainly better than Red Dead 2 was. Anytime I say we haven't crunched, someone is going to say I did." And I don't want to get into arguments with individual teams or individual people, but I think we did things differently and I'm proud of that. Crunch is a tough one. I mean, there's a wide spectrum between working overtime for a night to finish something and spending months not seeing your family because you have to be in the office for nights and weekends. And I think a lot of Rockstar's games have been different places on this spectrum. I think for some people GTA 6 was a tough project. For other people it was easier. That's the other part of Crunch is that it can look drastically different if you're in, I don't know, the India office versus if you're in the New York office. if you're working on GTA online versus GTA 6 like single player mode. So, it's very difficult to say like this was a problematic project or this wasn't a problematic project. That said, I've talked to a lot of people over the last few years. Haven't heard a ton of people being like this was super brutal, like this can't keep happening, this was awful for me. At the same time, I have heard from people who are like, yeah, worked a lot of hours on this project, was in the office till late night. Sometimes people say that they feel like it's voluntary because they're working on something because they're really proud of it and they want to keep it going, keep make it good. Other times I I haven't really heard anything this time around from people who who are like, "Yeah, they were forcing us in the office." That said, and that all sounded a little wishy-washy. And that's kind of by design because I want to zoom out for a second and point out that one of the reasons that Red Dead 2's crunch became a flashoint isn't just cuz like people were crunching on the game. people crunch on most games. It's because of the culture that was set. For example, it was known within the company that when the housesers come to town, you better be sitting in your desk because they want to see you staring at your desks. Or like there were these executives who would like threaten to fire people or like there were all sorts of kind of like abusive is a strong word, but certainly questionable practices surrounding the culture. And I think Rockstar has made a very deliberate and very I think successful effort to fix some of those parts of the culture. Some of the stuff that made it feel more like a frat house than like a professional work environment. It's kind of reminiscent of like I mean a lot of companies have been through this. And so they got rid of a lot of people who were accused of kind of problematic behavior in previous decades and that was a big deal. And then the other part of this equation that I think is an important part is that the thing I've actually gotten the most complaints from Rockstar people about is not crunch. It is uh remote policies. Because along the process of this game, what happened was there was a huge leak in 2022 where a whole bunch of unfinished footage from GTA 6 got out on the internet. And in response, Rockstar enacted a 5 days a week back in the office policy. And worse than that, no logging into your work from anywhere else. And that one is a killer because for a lot of people, myself included, sometimes it like it can be essential to be like, I'm going to do my workday and then take a couple hours, put the kids to bed, and then maybe catch up on a little bit while I'm in bed on my laptop or something or like after the kids go to bed. For a lot of people with families, that's how you kind of can fit a little bit of extra work in your life. um when when need be. Hopefully, it's not every night, but but if you need to. And that's much more difficult when you can't actually work from home. You have to go into the office. And so, that is one of the policies that like a lot of people have found very controversial, very polarizing at Rockstar. Their argument is that it's necessary for security, to which a lot of employees have been grumbling because a leak just happened in August of this year before the Netflix premiere happened. And so all of those draconian security measures didn't actually seem to prevent that. This is weirdly a good setup for the the final beat of this section, which is the union stuff. We're recording this, as you said, in early October, maybe around the time this episode airs, the trial between Rockstar and the IWGB union workers should be concluding. But can you catch folks up on how this ties into this decision and why people here like you're saying like maybe crunch isn't as bad. Why the questions around the union are still so timely. Yeah. And I I I just want to be clear. I can't definitively say crunch wasn't as bad. I think it really just depends where you were where the thing that I've heard pretty consistently is that the culture surrounding crunch has gotten better. So kind of a might sound pantic but I think it's an important difference there. So yeah. So, what happened just to catch people up is in the fall of 2025, Rockstar abruptly fired 34 people, 31 in the UK and three in Canada. And those people said they were fired for union busting because most of them were involved in organizing in some way. Rockstar fired back that they were actually fired for quote unquote egregious misconduct, which they later explained was what they say is leaking confidential information on a Discord that was being used to uh talk about union efforts. Rockstar has made the argument that the people who had access to this Discord were not just current employees, but also former employees. It was a lot of people and they weren't keeping track of exactly who like if people were sticking around after they left the company. um and also someone who wrote like articles on the internet about Rockstar and the union has has said and will be arguing in court in this tribunal that Rockstar is trying to scare them out of unionizing and create this culture of fear etc etc. One of the big sticking points for the unionization effort was remote work. And that is something that they actually came out, the union came out heavily against when the policy was implemented back in 2024 or so. The union spoke out and they were like, "This is like messed up. This is not good. Like we don't want this, etc., etc." So that was definitely one of the things that I think Rockstar is unionizing to try to fight for more flexibility when it comes to remote work. So to kind of the koda on this is that even as this tribunal argument is happening, Rockstar staff actually have continued their effort to unionize and over the summer they've been meeting weekly with Rockstar Management and Jen Colby actually told me they've been having quote unquote positive discussions when it comes to unionization. And Colby told me uh in this story, again, this is from my Bloomberg story, quote, "We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union. Hm. Okay. Well, we'll see. I' I've heard versions of that from other companies, too, that don't have unions, and I've heard it from some that do. So, we will see. Either way, we're going to do the most controversial thing now and pivot from talking about unions to just talking about the video game. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Act two, a taste of the biggest game on the planet. So Chris, I have a good segue for you. I love it. I see a lot of parallels between the games that Rockstar makes and the company that it is. 2013, they released GTA 5. This is a game that revels in nihilism. This is a game that stars the most absurd cartoon villain characters you can imagine. people who are just exhausting to spend time with. And then they moved to Red Dead 2, which really, I think, surprised a lot of people with its portrayal of Arthur Morgan, this criminal with a heart of gold who tries to find redemption for his awful deeds. And it was >> breaking up from a toxic relationship with that sort of nihilist. >> Yeah, it's really it's really interesting. If you subscribe to the belief that all video games are about the process of making those video games, then yeah, the story of Dutch is really interesting and is continually his acting asking his gang to just trust him. Just trust him one last time, etc., etc. But yeah, but then it it just felt like they were kind of taking their stories a little more seriously. And that's not Rockstar has always put value on storytelling in games and often times they've had great stories in their games, but it feels like I don't know they've tried to grow up a little bit. Certainly from GTA V to Red Dead 2. And now they're going back to the land of Grand Theft Auto, which is this again absurd, satirical, often nihilistic look at America. Yet this time they're doing it with these characters who are meant to be taken a lot more seriously than Michael and Trevor and Franklin ever were. And in fact, I suspect, I haven't played the game yet, but I suspect that this story that they're telling will feel a lot closer to Red Dead 2 than it does to GTA 5. It's a little bit more grounded, and it's a little bit more serious. The characters are meant to be a lot more likable and relatable, and you are meant to empathize with them in a way that I don't think ever anyone has ever empathized with Trevor. It feels like at the same time that Rockstar is trying to grow up a little bit, so are its games, which I think is kind of an interesting parallel. I agree with everything you said, but here's my like cynical skeptical side of this, which is Rockstar built this entire brand on being shiters, on being outsiders, on trying to act like record labels, right? in GTA 1 through 4 and even Red Dead 1, they're like tremendous successes. They're nothing compared to GTA 5 in terms of sales. Suddenly, they are now thrown into the top of the pack. Rumors about them shipped stock values, right? So, this idea of being the I'm going to put my thumb in your eye, I'm going to be the nihilist, I'm going to make all the South Park jokes, you know, I'm the equal opportunity offender. And now shifting to a place where there they've already said preemptively you won't see co 19 in this game set in Florida. You won't hear about Trump in this game set in Florida which they've always been going after the biggest kind of softest targets in the things that represent whoever the places they're in. Feels to me like a business decision as much as it does a creative one. >> It could be. Another way of thinking of this is that these games are reflection of their time and GTA 5 was very much a reflection of the earnest Obama era, the era where everyone was obsessed with Aaron Sorgens, the West Wing, whereas now we're in an era where everything is nihilistic and cynical. So maybe this is just kind of a counterpoint to that. But yes, I mean absolutely. I think that Well, I don't know. I mean, I I think that like they certainly also risk being tarnished as the oh my god, GTA went woke game. And so, you could argue that it's like uh not a bad business decision to choose to, for example, remove transphobic jokes from your games or cancel a planned cops and crooks mode during the George Floyd protests in 2020, which are all things that Rockstar did. But I don't know. I mean, you could be right, too. Certainly. What's the Michael Jordan quote? Republicans buy sneakers, too. And when the stakes are this high and you need to uh sell not just tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of copies, maybe you can't get away with throwing grenades anymore. That said, I mean, you could see from the 27minute Netflix premiere, this is still going to be a game that throws grenades. Like, it is still going to satarize. >> What's the opening line of the Netflix premiere? Do you remember it? It's something like crackheads coming or something. And I was like, >> they very much are proud of themselves. They know. >> Yeah. And it's like this is a game that is going to be full of Florida stereotypes. And I'm sure they're going to be I mean, you can even see there's like that billionaire tech dude who's like they're defending at the end of the premiere. I'm sure we're going to see some kind of faximiles for I don't know Elon Musk or like Ronda Santis or something. I wouldn't be shocked if we see stuff like that. We're certainly going to see social media takedowns. There's one part where like there's a streamer who's streaming in the back of Lucia's trunk as she's driving. So, they are going to throw grenades. I just think that it's maybe a little bit less of a cynical approach given that. And also, I mean, one distinction here, by the way, one important thing to say is that like there's the world and just kind of environment of GTA and then there's the story of the main characters. And I think GTA 5 had a world and environment that was like absurd and nihilistic and also main characters who were just awful and uh just not really fun to spend time with. If I if I put my like more generous hat on here and is the truth is I land somewhere between these two thoughts because I don't think it's purely cynical. I don't think they're like purely just running from every controversy. I don't think you can make this game if that's what you're trying to do. I do wonder how much of it is changing because a lot of the GTA stuff sucked and had like gotten stale many years before even GTA 5 came out like you're talking about where everything was a joke. Every Coke can was like some weird joke. Every radio station was the stickiest obvious humor. And it it did have this question of how can you be so obsessed with Michael Man, a director fixated on realism of like actually hiring people who are out of jail to like help him learn about the crime that he is trying to portray in his films and then here you are doing that then also being like it's called fart cola. Did you hear from them of are are they thinking about their tone in a different way with this new leadership structure? It's funny you say that because to me that also speaks to the fact that these games are made by thousands of people and there's no way for a single person to be the Michael man. Like there's nobody in in at Rockstar who like has seen every single tiny little thing in the game. Like that would be physically impossible as far as I know. I didn't talk so much about the tone with them, but I was talking a little bit about like some of the stuff that they're the features that they're most proud of, the stuff that took the longest to finish, the stuff that they that they really are excited for people to check out. And the big thing that they kept talking about was being able to free roam in the world with both characters at once. So, let's say you're playing as Jason, you can text and be like, "Hey, you want to hang out?" And she'll be like, "Yeah, one sec." And she'll come over. You can hold hands and walk in the park and then you can go on a crime spree together. You could go work out and like you'll get into the gym and you'll start lifting like benching and then she'll run in the treadmill nearby and then you got to go get her and bring her out with you. And they just did all this work to make it so that like your partner will do stuff in the world with you and interact in in with with whatever you're doing in a realistic way. And again, it struck me as something that is like, oh, okay, this is a game where you're playing as two people who enjoy spending time together, which just feels like it has this groundedness that that that previous GTA didn't really have. GTA V, I mentioned a few times, awful people. GTA 4 and Nicole is a much more sympathetic character, but he's also not someone you would really want to spend a lot of time with. And he also seems to like his cousin. >> He's quite reserved >> Roman, but also he seems to hate everybody. Like Roman is calling him and he just seems like annoyed at best every time his cousin wants to hang out with him and stuff like that. So it's like you've never really seen a GTA game where it's like two people who actually enjoy spending time together and seem to have this kind of relationship of love and respect that plays out in the story. And that to to me even just like even if you have the I don't know dumb fart jokes and posters and like whatever low shots that they wound up wind up taking which by the way won't include like transphobic stuff which I think is kind of another one of those just like oh Rockstar's trying to grow up a little bit. They're they're picking their targets a little bit more wisely and and trying not to punch down so much. But even if you have all that stupidity, I think exploring that world with much stronger characters, I think, does a lot to to make the kind of the educated gamer or the the gamer who doesn't have quite as much tolerance for purile humor, I think, look past that or accept it. I think there's a person who hears the game that you're describing and they're thinking, "Why is this not co-op? Like, why can I not play this with a friend? This sounds like a a it takes two sort of experience. And I I assume the answer is well because they're making GTA online, but news on that has been so thin since the announcement of this game. Why have we not heard much about it? And like when should we expect to start hearing more about it? I don't know the answers to those questions. I think the general expectation is that it'll come out at some point next year. So, a little bit away. I don't know. I It's not something I spoke to them about cuz I expect it will be its own just kind of separate beat on this on this whole thing. But no, they're just focusing on the single player right now. Here's where I'll ask you to put on more like the analysis mindset than the reporter mindset, which is earlier this year, Rockstar announced that you can now have usermade levels or missions basically in GTA Online. And it's no secret that Roblox and Fortnite's game creation tools are this powerful economic force in video games. They are the envy of every major company. And I imagine even Rockstar is keeping an eye on it. Should we expect you think that to be that level creation tool to be the beginning of something that we will have a lot more usergenerated content in whatever comes next? >> See, I can't put on my analysis hat because anything I say will get aggregated and posted on Twitter by GTA fan accounts saying Jason Trier says that this is going to happen. So, I can't speculate about anything. All I can talk about is what I heard. And no, I keep making this mistake. I'm not going to do it again. I'm not going to fall for this social media trap again. >> That said, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if they're like looking at this next iteration of GTA online as an opportunity to be something that is like their next big platform. Like, I feel like they have such a strong foundation with GTA 5's online in terms of player base and revenue generation that Yeah, I would be shocked if they weren't. And didn't they also they bought some companies that were making like doing like role playing stuff. They've made a lot of just kind of quiet investments in this world. >> For anybody at our games, you can just write GTA 6 the next Fortnite and then quote, "I wouldn't be shocked," says Jason Shrier, and then just really make sure to include a link back to this show. Well, the problem that you're going to run into, Chris, is that the people I'm talking about on Twitter and Instagram who do theation, they don't post links. >> Uh, they don't post links. Okay, let's let's wrap up the game section before I get depressed. >> What does success actually look like for GTA 6 and what does failure look like? And I will say, I want to be super clear here. I'm not talking about the next six months because as you mentioned with GTA 5, that game is released like 5,000 times across multiple generations, across multiple platforms. So, in the broader picture, what does success and failure look like? I think they're definitely looking at the next 6 months. One thing I remember hearing, and I believe it's still true to this day, is that people at Rockstar, certainly top decision makers at Rockstar, were not thrilled that God of War beat Red Dead Redemption 2 at the 2018 Game Awards for game of the year. And I expect that they are all hoping very much that GTA 6 a beats Red Dead 2 on Metacritic and B wins game of the year in every possible awards ceremony there is. So I certainly think that's that's something that is important to them. I think the developers care less about breaking sales records, but if you ask Take 2 CEO Strauss Zelnik, I think his concern is is selling as many copies as humanly possible, which is probably going to happen based on everything we've seen so far, all the metrics we've seen so far. I'm honestly I'm I'm shocked. Like that is very sweet and I guess I should be encouraged that people like they're worried about the awards. I cannot imagine giving a single about that with something this big for like a number of reasons. One, >> why not? Every game developer if you talk to Naughty Dog, they'll say the same thing. They want to win games. >> I guess maybe like if it was like the DICE awards or something, but like it feels >> the DICE awards. It's all of them. I mean, I think that just one of it the most impact >> when you're when you're this big of a game. What I would hope that these people understand is it has only a small portion to do with whether or not it's actually the best game. There is an entire meta around what can win these awards each year. What I said earlier, which is that like when you talk to these guys and you look at them and you look at how they work, it's like they are just like every other game developer just in their own. You're right. The reason Rockstar has this mystique because they don't have like the equivalent of a Neil Duckman who does a lot of press and is the face of the the studio and is on social media. Like none of their top people are on social media. So like nobody knows the faces behind Rockstar, but when you actually talk to them and meet them, which I'm glad I got the opportunity to do, they're just like any other game developer. Like they don't care so much about sales. They're in their own little world. They're concerned about like making the best game possible and they want to see that effort get critically rewarded. So, they care deeply about their Metacritic scores and their game awards nominees and and whatnot. That's just always been a part of Rockstar's culture. And yeah, they they've always cared about that stuff. I love it. I just I feel I feel sympathetic, bad for for some of these developers because as someone who's had to be on the other side of voting on those things and who knows about the meta and how all that works, the thing like them not having a Neil Duckman is going to influence whether that's it. The larger story around what's going on with like Take Two and Strauss Selnic and money, all of these things become factors. And I think people would like to believe that there is just like the best game wins and that's I mean you can look at the Academy Awards even like you know long established things that's just not the the case but but >> it's interesting you say that it's a good it's a righteous goal >> this year more than ever the slate is just very weak I think so >> it's going to win to be clear they don't need to worry about it this year I think it's almost certainly got shoe >> yeah there's you don't have to it's Not like there's a Clare obscure this year. If there was, that'd be really interesting. But uh fortunately for for Rockstar, they don't really have any competition this year. >> Yes. Well, preemptively, congratulations to them. >> Congrats. Congrats to Rockstar. We're this this episode is airing what, like 3 weeks before the game is actually out, and we're already congratulating them on game of the year. >> Oh my god. Jason, we're going to do a quick bonus segment, but before we do that, I want to give you a chance to plug everything for the folks listening right now. >> Yeah, sure. Go out there and buy yourself a Bloomberg terminal. It is only $32,000 a year or something like that. I don't remember the exact price. So, you Google Bloomberg terminal cost and you'll find it. >> I think it's only 28K. I watched a video on it recently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And then you'll be able to support my work firsthand at bloomberg.com. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jason. A Patreon bonus where Grand Theft Auto and video games go from here. You know how this works. This is where we split up. Patreon subscribers. Jason very kindly stuck around to talk more about the future of Grand Theft Auto. And some of this is a little bit of analysis. Some of this on my part is a bit of speculation. But most interestingly, Jason has some details about where Rockstar's head is at for the future of GTA. And it sounds like we won't be waiting quite so long for whatever comes next. For everybody else, we still got the song of the week, so you're going to want to stick around. Let's split. That is most certainly not a wrap on GTA 6. This game will be sticking around for the foreseeable future for years, maybe a decade, maybe more if it's like the last one. But there are other things going on in the world, like next week when you tune into post games and hear about a force more powerful than any video game. Luigi. Podcaster and writer Drew Mackey joins the show to share his thoroughly researched history of Mario's brother. What better way to enjoy Halloween season than with a scaredy-cat who can't seem to stay away from haunted houses. Until then, a reminder, postgame supporters get the show and the newsletter early on Fridays. They get extra acts and bonus materials. This week, Patreon listeners got an extended conversation with Jason Shrier about where Grand Theft Auto goes from here and many other things, too. Plus, each month, subscribers get a bonus episode in my ongoing series, Past Games, in which I share deep dive histories into the gaming anniversaries of 2026. The most recent episode shares the history of Grand Theft Auto 3 and draws a line between 2001's biggest video game and this year's mega release and no ads on anything. Subscribe to Patreon for five bucks at patreon.com/postgames. Subscribe to the newsletter for free at post.game. Postgames logo by James Barum. Theme by Mark Sparling. Additional music from Epidemic Sound. And a special thank you to this week's guest, Jason Shrier. Like the show, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or share the show with a friend. And now to take us out, an original song from Floor Plan, Slap Out of It. This is Hotel Hexopod by Shaun Bon. I'll see you next week. Heat. >> >> Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. >> >> Heat. Heat. >>