Bloomberg's Jason Schreier spent a day at Rockstar North in Edinburgh in late September, while its staff were fixing bugs ahead of launch, and Rockstar's leaders told him on the record how GTA 6 was made. His feature, published on October 14, 2026, sits behind Bloomberg's paywall. Here is what it reports, as the press relays it, and what it tells players about November 19.
November 19 still looks set
Schreier writes that November 19 does look like GTA 6's real release date, while warning that in games nothing is certain until it runs on your console. Rockstar has announced no new delay: its Launch Trailer of October 15 still gives November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Our release date page follows every official word, and the unlock time in your country comes from the PlayStation Store listings.
He spoke with the three heads of development, Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker, who have led the game since Dan Houser left Rockstar, as well as Jennifer Kolbe, head of publishing, and Jonathon Ashcroft, senior vice president for technology.
From Project Americas to Leonida
Rob Nelson and other Rockstar staff took their first research trip to Miami in 2015. The project, code-named Project Americas, was meant to cover large parts of North and South America, before Rockstar narrowed it down to Vice City and its surroundings: today's Leonida, which our map reconstructs region by region.
Rockstar first hoped to make it alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but finishing the western took most of the company and pushed the next GTA back several years. The outline of Jason and Lucia's story was in place by the end of 2019. The rest of the game took far longer to settle: Nelson remembers a "dark period" when its overall vision was still unclear.
Why it took so long
Rockstar grew from 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018 to 4,711 across 12 offices as of August 2026. That is the whole company, which now puts most of its people on one major game at a time. The game's crowd of characters was one bottleneck: when the team counted how many it had to write and animate, it found it lacked the capacity, and built a studio in Los Angeles, with its own writers, producers and directors, to make them.
Rockstar blames no single crisis: many parts of the game moved at different speeds. Hooker says they could have hit an earlier date, but the result would not have been the game they wanted. GTA 6 was first aimed at 2025, then May 26, 2026, then November 19, 2026, and Kolbe broke the news of both delays to Take-Two's chief executive, Strauss Zelnick. Rockstar gives no budget, but Kolbe denies the rumor that it cost more than $1.5 billion.
Overtime and the leaks
Kolbe says Rockstar did not want to finish another game with long stretches of overtime. It hired more people, changed its scheduling and now gives paid time off for extra hours, sometimes with extra pay. She does not claim crunch is gone. After the September 2022 leak of in-development footage, Rockstar tightened its security: by 2024, employees had to work from the office five days a week, with no access to its tools from home.
What the demo showed
Rockstar did not let Schreier play. In a second piece, on October 16, he describes watching Nelson play as Jason, who slipped with Lucia into the back office of a gas station and took its cash without alerting anyone. There are "hundreds" of little interiors like it to explore, Rockstar told him. Schreier finds the story closer to Red Dead Redemption 2 than to GTA 5: "a story about two people who actually enjoy spending time together".
Hooker gives his own example of the open world taking over. On his way to a story mission during testing, a run-in with another driver set off a chain of thefts and chases, and two hours later he still had not reached it. Everything else known about how GTA 6 plays is in our guide to its gameplay features.
After GTA 6
Rockstar's leaders expect their next game not to take another eight years. The engine, the tools and the team built for GTA 6 will let Rockstar work faster, Hooker says, and Garbut says the studio will build on that base instead of tearing it apart again. No new game has been announced.
