Hello, OneTakeSchrier here. Today, I published a massive story for Bloomberg's Businessweek magazine about the development of Grand Theft Auto 6, which is due to be one of the biggest games of all time. Analysts estimate that it will sell 40 million copies in its first few months, generate more than $3 billion in revenue, but I suspect that's a conservative estimate. So, hey, what are we going to do about this? Well, I think I'm going to make multiple videos about this story and how it came together, but today I'm going to give you a little bit of a broad overview overview of the development of Grand Theft Auto 6, but please do check out the story. You can find a link in the show notes in this YouTube description, and you'll also be able to find it in print in uh I believe late October. Um it's the November issue, so whenever it hits stands on Bloomberg's Businessweek magazine. For those of you who still like the feeling of paper in your hands, it will be in print. So, about a month ago, I went to Edinburgh, Scotland, which is where Rockstar's main headquarters is kind of brain trust is based, Rockstar North. That is where the top creative leads and executive and executives at Rockstar work, and I sat down and interviewed a whole bunch of them for a story about the development of this game. Once again, you can check that out on Bloomberg, but I will give you an overview of what happened and why it took so long. So, plans for Grand Theft Auto 6 started, I would say started, I would say around 2015. There had been discussions earlier, but it was 2015 that Rockstar creative lead Rob Nelson and a group of other top staff went to Miami, Florida for their first research trip to scope out the city and figure out what GTA 6 was going to look like. They knew it was going to be in Vice City at that point. They were actually calling it Project Americas, a code name for the game that would stick. It's still the code name for the game because it would be North and South America and it would be big chunks of land across both that would later be scoped down to just Miami and its surrounding areas in Florida. But in 2015 is when they started, but then something interesting happened. Something pivotal happened. Red Dead Redemption 2, which was the other game that they were working on at the time, needed more help, had really ambitious goals for realism and simulations, and the Rockstar leadership team gradually realized that they, and also the bulk of Rockstar staff, would need to go and work on that one rather than trying to do GTA 6 and Red Dead 2 concurrently. This is a major decision. They thought it would pay off in the long run because by building these foundations with Red Dead 2, they would then be able to carry them over to GTA 6. But at the same time, they knew that it would push out GTA 6 many years. Um they would have to They wouldn't really be able to start working on it until after Red Dead 2 came out, which would be 2018. So, GTA 6 really, um if you're kind of looking at proper development, started around 2019, which is when they started kind of figuring out what it was going to look like, what the story was going to be, who the main characters would be. And by the end of 2019, they had the skeleton in place. This would be a Bonnie and Clyde-inspired story telling uh the narrative of two criminals, Jason and Lucia, this couple who uh had to kind of rob and and heist their way through the city underbelly of Miami, drug dealers and cop shootouts and all that other stuff that you have in GTA 6. But at the same time, there were kind of two two big things happening. One is on the development side and one is on the culture side. I'll get to both. Let's talk about the development side first. So, on the development side, um they were trying to figure out exactly what this game was going to look like, which kind of might seem like an odd question, right? It's a GTA game. It's a big open world. You drive around. You steal cars. You shoot things. Uh shoot people. You shoot cops. You get into drug dealers. You have a big story, lots of missions, um lots of side activities like basketball and tennis and whatever, right? That all seems pretty basic. But actually, with this game, there were a lot of decisions to be made and a lot of stuff was in flux. They had to decide just how much of the realism from Red Dead 2 were they going to carry over. And so, one example of this that they were telling me about was, let's say you go to a store. Um now, in most video games, including previous GTA games, you go to a store and you just kind of buy what you want by going to the counter and just pressing a button in the kind of simplistic uh way that ditches realism in favor of fun and just kind of easy convenience, let's say. Um but in GTA 6, there were bigger questions about this. I mean, this is such a high-fidelity game and it's such a kind of a game that values realistic systems. So, would you then, instead of just pressing a button, would you have to go to the fridge and take a beer case out of the fridge and then bring it to the store clerk and then pay for it? And what if you just went to the fridge and grabbed a beer case and then actually just left the store with the the clerk call the cops? Um and you get into these kind of granular decisions that really make it difficult to figure out what the game is actually going to be. Um especially when it's so early on in development that you can't actually see this stuff in the game cuz so much of it is still unimplemented. So, it's really hard to test out what's working and what's not. And at the same time, you have a pandemic that has just hit and forced everybody to work from home and disrupted work across the world because it wasn't just that people had to work remotely. It was also that they had to watch their children and uh or supervise like remote schooling or be stuck with their couples in small apartments and all sorts of other issues that people were running into during COVID, not to mention the kind of mental health crisis of working during a pandemic. Which, by the way, you might be sick of hearing about this because it's been such a big part of game development stories over the last few years, but it was a big part of game development stories over the last few years. And in fact, the COVID pandemic likely added at least a year of development time to most big games that were in early production at that point. So, there were a lot of decisions that had to be made and it took a long time for for them to get out of what Rob Nelson called to me the doldrums, the dark times, the dark period of them figuring out what the game was, finding the fun. It wasn't really until, let's call it 2022 or so, when they like had more of a vision coalesced. And really, it wasn't until the first trailer in 2023 that everybody on the team could actually see what the game was going to look like, which really helps quite a bit. I have a great quote in the story that I'll read from uh from Hold on, let me pull this up. This is Jonathan Ashcroft, the senior vice president for technology at Rockstar, and he said to me, "The trailers are huge guiding lights for us. You'd think it would be done through documentation or communication, but nothing aligns us like a trailer." By the way, that's true for a lot of game studios. Culturally, Rockstar was also changing quite a bit. In 2018, after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, there was a flashpoint for Rockstar. Rockstar's kind of I would say workplace Rockstar's work-life balance became a flashpoint of conversation. It became a big topic of conversation that Rockstar had gone through what the industry the video game industry calls crunch, which is periods of excessive overtime often weeks or months worth of overtime straight not just like a night here to finish something or a week here to finish a milestone. We're talking about long periods of time that involve a lot of overtime and I actually at the time spoke to a whole lot of people for a Kotaku story about Red Dead Redemption 2's crunch and general consensus was I mean everybody had their own opinions and their own experiences. Some had crunched more than others, but general consensus was this was better than previous projects, but it was still pretty gnarly for a lot of people. More recently in this for this article, I spoke to Jen Colby who is the head of publishing for Rockstar and she told me that even before that kind of big public controversy in my article and others, they were really just kind of looking at each other. I'm going to read read a quote from her. We all looked at each other and said quote we're not doing it again like this. We're not going to finish this game meaning GTA 6 by crunching. So they wanted to change things internally at that point and they started doing a bunch of things to try to mitigate crunch for this next project including more rigorous scheduling more kind of evaluating expectations of like how long it will take someone to do a task and when it can be delivered. That sort of thing. They also doubled the size of the studio and this was pretty stunning to find out. This again is in in the Bloomberg piece that I published. We actually have a chart in in there to show you the enormous growth of Rockstar. Rockstar went from I'm going to get you the exact numbers 24 hundred, sorry, 2441 employees in 2018 to 4711 employees by August of this year. So, nearly doubled in size to work on this game. Now, granted, not everybody was working on this game. They also have a significant, like a sizable portion of their team working on GTA Online and publishing and other stuff, but largely to work on this game. They built a new studio in Los Angeles just for making NPCs. Just to make NPCs, they hired all these writers and directors and producers just to make NPCs. Wild Wild to be able to spend all the money in the world on your video game. By the way, I asked them, they wouldn't tell me the budget for GTA 6. They did say it cost less than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which was a rumor. That reportedly cost 1 and 1/2 billion dollars. So, we can say that GTA 6 cost less than 1 and 1/2 billion dollars, but don't know the exact number. I think safe to say that this is the most expensive video game ever made simply based on the amount of time it took and the team sizes that they have. So, um this is a company that was trying to avoid crunch and at the end of the day, did they? I mean, I think that I have certainly heard from some people who crunched on this game, who put in overtime on this game, but it was not It's not been conveyed to me as a huge problem of crunch culture the way it was on previous projects including Red Dead 2. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that they got rid of a lot of problematic managers, managers who were complained about, managers who were accused of doing abusive things or of pushing crunch culture over the last few years, especially after the release of Red Dead 2. And they also implemented a policy that I think helped quite a bit, which is that they are offering time off in lieu of every uh overtime hour that people work. So, essentially, you you opt into this program, and um for every extra hour you work past whatever the core hours are, whatever nights and weekends you put in, you then get that same number of hours as vacation time, which you can then take, presumably, after the project is over. So, um that, assuming it's all paid off and it's all actually executed and delivered upon the way that Rockstar has promised it would be, um that, I think, goes a long way towards making up for extra time. And one of the biggest problems with crunch, by the way, at some point, uh I have on my list of video topics, uh at some point I'm going to make a video about crunch, because I think there's a lot of nuance there that is worth exploring and talking about. Crunch can ruin people's lives, and at the same time, it also, I think, uh there's it's it's a spectrum, um and I think that uh there's a huge huge difference between putting in overtime, um a certain amount like for for a limited period with a focused goal, and the kind of death march that is months and months of just like staying at the sleeping at the office, and just put doing nothing but work, and destroying your marriage, and never seeing your kids as a result of that. There's a large spectrum there, and there can be healthier forms of crunch and unhealthier forms of crunch. Um but I do think one of the biggest problems in the video game industry is that a lot of times crunch is unpaid, because people are on salaries on annual salaries, they're not being paid hourly, and therefore, they are not getting properly compensated for the extra hours they put in. And therefore, giving people proper uh paid time off for every single extra hour they work, I think, is is a much more fair way of doing things. And in fact, when I do ask people at Rockstar, not the top people, the people on the ground level, "Hey, like, what was kind of what were some of the challenges you ran into on this game?" Crunch comes up way less often than another issue. So, here's another part of Rockstar's culture that really changed over the last few years. In 2022, uh a hacker online released dozens of videos of unfinished gameplay from Grand Theft Auto 6 before the game was even announced. It was a catastrophic leak for Rockstar Games. It was embarrassing. Um Aaron Garbut, who's one of the heads of development on this game and the top artist on this game, told me um quote uh Hold on, I got to pull up the story. Um it feels like somebody's wading through your dirty washing. It's like they're inside your head. You see your early work out there. Nobody's ever supposed to see that. It's really weirdly invasive. So, it's quite hard to deal with on an emotional level. It was really tough for a lot of people, I think, especially because you saw people on social media being like, "Look at this janky unfinished gameplay." And you a lot of people wanted to even want to kind of smack them upside the head and be like, "Yes, this game is not finished. Be It looks unfinished because it is unfinished." Um but that hack led to uh had a lot of repercussions for Rockstar, and Rockstar internally decided that they were going to beef up their security procedures to try to prevent it from happening again. And one of the things they did is by 2024, they had announced that all employees of Rockstar um all across the world, uh they have about 12 offices all in a bunch of different countries um from the US to the UK to India and more. All of those people had to go into their respective offices five days a week. So, no more kind of hybrid work schedule, no more remote time. And then this is the most controversial part of this. They also could not log in to their work devices if they were remote. You could not put in You could not go home and then put in a few extra hours at night after the kids go to bed or something like that. That was a huge deal, and I would say to this day um, as I'm recording this is still the most controversial, the most polarizing policy at Rockstar for most people, um, or at least most people that I've spoke to and the sentiments that I've heard. And that is because it is really, it's really tough to, um, not have any sort of flexibility when it comes to that stuff, especially if you have children. Um, anyone who has children knows that, uh, a lot of things come up, sick days and snow days and child care not being available for specific day. And often times you can mitigate that and still do your job by just staying home. Um, even just having an hour here or there to kind of fill in the gaps if your kid gets out of school at 3:00 and they just need to be on super, like, sitting in the house watching TV for an hour, but they can't be completely unsupervised, there has to be an adult in the house. Being able to work in your office while that is happening is a huge deal and makes your life much easier. But, as a result of this new Rockstar policy, people couldn't do that. And so therefore they had to take PTO if they if they had a child care issue or something like that. This was extremely controversial and became even more controversial in the last couple of months when a new leaker popped back up called Cyber Leaks and has been posting all sorts of footage over the last, uh, last few weeks. Um, uh, that again, very frustrating for a lot of employees, both because of the leaks themselves and also because it felt like all of this kind of these draconian measures have been for nothing because the game leaked anyway. So I think that was really frustrating for a lot of people. It also plays into the crunch part of things. I think anyone who is, um, who has a family and has had to, or really anyone who's had to put in extra hours here and there for their jobs knows that it can be, it's much more doable, it's much easier to kind of pull that off when you can go to the office from for your core hours, 10 to 6 or whatever. You go home, you make yourself dinner, maybe you put your kids to bed, and then you put in a couple hours after that, rather than having to go to back to the office or just stay in the office without seeing your family or without going home and eating takeout dinner and gaining 20 lb. Um to be able to put in those extra hours at home, I think can make a huge deal. So, that was very controversial. Still, um I think Rockstar has made it clear that they are trying to change. They are trying to um do different sorts of uh approaches to their culture than they had in the past. I think the biggest change that they made was getting rid of a lot of the quote bad actors that I mentioned before, people who had been accused of abusive behavior and bullying and all sorts of other issues over the years. I've done a bunch of reporting about this over time. I wrote about Crunch in 2018. I also did a big story about a Rockstar executive um who was accused of groping uh a subordinate among other things. So, um yeah, that that was a big deal. So, all right, going back to the development timeline for GTA 6 cuz I'm sure a lot of you are still wondering like, well, okay, what happened to make it take so long? And I'm going to bring up a few other factors. So, one is um the amount of detail in the game. Um as a result of all these systems, uh the developers on GTA 6 are putting in a lot of time and a lot of money in ways that I think um aren't really going to show up in any other game, even the other AAA games. For example, um nightclubs. We were talking about nightclubs, and the developers of this game talk a lot about nightclubs. Because when they make these nightclubs um in Miami, they are not only just kind of trying to recreate a nightclub, they are building simulations that will just kind of make the inside of a nightclub work exactly as realistic as you expect it to be. So, for example, they're modeling every single NPC in the nightclub as like individual people. They are doing the lighting for the nightclub. They are doing the music for the nightclub. They are making sure the music and the lighting match up, so the lighting is kind of moving to the same rhythm as the music. They are building these systems. One system they were telling me about, uh this didn't make it into the article, so here's a little bonus info, is um sweat. They told me that they have a system, a scripted system in the game, a specific system in the game that will make it so uh Lucia or Jason or whoever uh will exert uh different amounts of sweat depending on how much effort they're putting in to like if they're dancing extra hard in the nightclub, they will sweat more than if they are not, which I think shows you the level of detail they're putting into this game. That's one issue. Um another issue was finding that vision in those first three few three or four years of development. That was That was probably the biggest issue and the thing that made it take the longest was that was just kind of having everyone work towards this vision that was constantly changing. Um kind of directions that were were a little bit of unclear. Um I mentioned in this piece, I didn't mention in the video yet, but something that happened is that um these three guys uh Rob Nelson, uh Aaron Garbut, and Phil Hooker all became quote head of development on this game. They all share that title. And as a result, this was a production where the three of them were making decisions together and it was kind of uh a little bit of a committee making decisions and sometimes, at least the perception from the ground level was that they would make conflicting decisions, there would be indecisions. I asked Rob Nelson a little bit about this. He was a little more defensive. He didn't think that that was actually the case. Um but, you know, your your mileage may vary depending where you are in the pipeline and the production uh of this game and also when you were asked this. Um there were other issues, too. So, in December of 2023, they properly announced the game with the first big trailer and they said it would be out in 2025, which of course turned out to be not the case. Um they told me they genuinely believe that when they announced it. I'm a little skeptical. Uh, I think on the ground level, people were certainly skeptical of 2025. To be fair, I think sometimes you just need to kind of plant your flag on the ground even if you know a date or a year isn't completely realistic, you just have to say it because saying indefinite can just be so bad for morale and for the team and or just saying not having a date or a year can can be really disruptive in other ways. So, sometimes sometimes you just want to say it. Um, and then I think that um, uh, so yeah, so then and then and then they obviously they delayed it to May and I think they saw that as a much more realistic deadline, but even that they couldn't make it. Jen Kolbe, the head of publishing, was telling me an anecdote about how how Strauss Zelnick, the head of Take-Two, the CEO of Take-Two, which is the corporate parent of Rockstar Games, was like when she called him and said that the game had been had to be delayed a second time from May to November, he was like, "You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding." He was flabbergasted. Um, and yeah, they ran into other issues along the way, technological issues, kind of vision issues, communication issues. They built out a huge team of producers as they doubled in size and that helped in in some ways, but it also just made it difficult to kind of communicate with everybody. At a certain point, they were kind of they were they were trying to find a flow of like emailing everybody just kind of clips from the game and trans sending all these raw raw morale boosting messages and stuff like that. Um, I was asking them a little bit more about the delays. They say there were no leadership at least at Rockstar says there were no like huge major factors behind these delays. It wasn't like a meteor hit the studio or something like that. Just a bunch of moving pieces that like didn't quite come together and also just kind of different things being finished at different times, some things being slower than others. Here's a quote from Phil Hooker that I think is illustrative of this whole process, which is quote, "The game's never completely settled. We never have an exact blueprint. Even within the last few months, we've changed things." Again, there's much more in the story, so please do check that out. We put a lot into it, and it's a really cool story, I think. Um, so yeah, here we are. It's October of 2026. The game is actually imminent. It is actually in sight. It is actually going to happen soon. Um, uh, I mean, I guess never say never in the video game industry, but it does seem like this date is not going to change. Um, and I think that, something that I am, there's a lot, there's a lot to kind of keep an eye on. And again, I'm going to make more videos about this cuz there's a lot more to talk about. I haven't even covered the, the battle that Rockstar is currently having with 34 people who it fired saying that they, were leaking information, that they accusing them of quote, "egregious misconduct." Um, they say that they were fired because of union busting, cuz most of them were involved in trying to start a union at Rockstar. Um, won't get into that in this video. I'll talk about that down the road, because that is actually a, in a case that is actively in litigation right now, and I think there will be more to talk about soon. But of course, I mentioned that in the story. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think that, there's lots more to talk about, but I think I'll end on one note, which is that, I think one of the reasons Rockstar games are so big and so beloved and so really special in a lot of ways, or at least special to people who really love them, and one of the reasons that they're successful, let's say, and one of the reasons they're so vivid and detailed and like look as great as they are, is because the people at the top, and really a lot of people below them, too, a lot of people at kind of different levels of this company, have been working together for decades. And I think you can't, in game development, you really cannot um overstate how important it is for a team to have shipped games together. That might be the most important thing that you can have in game development. And it's one of the big reasons that laying people off so often is so short-sighted by a lot of these companies. Like you look at what Xbox has been doing, they're really losing a lot of valuable assets by getting rid of teams that have shipped games together. Because a lot of times shipping a game together just kind of gets you through this fire and teaches you all to make decisions together and work together and and collaborate together in a way that is just so invaluable. It can't just be Again, it can't be overstated how important that is. And a lot of people at Rockstar have been doing that for 20 or 30 years together in some cases. Those people who I mentioned at the very top have all been working there for at least two decades um and have shipped a lot of games together. And I think that's really important. It gives you kind of a shorthand teaches you how to communicate with each other, even when you don't agree, when you're kind of butting heads on stuff, or like making conflicting decisions on stuff. At the end of the day, it really helps just to have that experience of working together. And when you don't, it causes a lot of problems. When you do, it can lead to a lot of success. So like I said, I'll be I'll be shooting some more videos about GTA 6. I think there's a lot more to talk about. But that's the kind of overall skeleton and the overall story of why this game took so long. Communication issues, technical issues, directional issues, especially in those first few years of development, um cultural adjustment issues, trying to deal with the ripple effects of Red Dead 2's crunch culture problems, trying to mitigate the crunch culture, seeing how that unfolded, doubling the size of the studio, figuring out what that looked like, trying to learn how to make games when you're suddenly 4, 700 people, bringing on a lot of people who had never shipped games with Rockstar before, and kind of trying to teach them how to ship games with Rockstar. Because they don't have those years of experience. Um, but at the end of the day, um, Aaron Garbut and others told me that, um, that they are planning that this is they feel like they've done something here that is foundational and will allow them to make more games or at least do more stuff, whether that's DLC and expansions or more online component or whatever else they're making. They feel like they will be able to build more on a much quicker cadence. And I'll I'll leave you with a couple of quotes. This is from Phil Hooker. He says, and again, this is from my Bloomberg story. "The engine, the tools, and the team we've built in during this project will allow us to do things more quickly. I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content." Um, and uh, he and and Aaron Garbut, they made the comparison to, um, GTA 3, which was released in 2001 after kind of like a normal, quote unquote normal for the time, development cycle. And then they went from that to being able to do Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in less than a year after that. Um, because it was built on all this work they had already done. Even though it was a different city, it was still a lot of foundational tech work and team work and pipeline work and stuff like that. And uh, here's Aaron Garbut, uh, again, one of the three heads of development, quote, "We foundationally changed a lot of the stuff on this project, but now it's done and we're not going to rip it apart." All right, make sure you check out the Bloomberg article. Once again, I got to promote this thing. Hey, they're the ones who pay me. That's my day job and that's where this story came out of is is Bloomberg Businessweek. Without Bloomberg, this story would not have happened. So, please do go check it out and I will be back with more GTA videos in the days and weeks to come. See you soon.