Future Rockstar games won’t take as long to make as GTA 6 has, the studio leadership currently behind the series have asserted, saying they’re “confident” work that’s gone into this latest game will allow them to build “more sideways than upwards” going forwards. That’s despite Red Dead Redemption 2 seemingly having been viewed in a similar light when Rockstar opted to put everyone on getting over the line rather than developing GTA 6 concurrently.

Phil Hooker, one of three veteran Rockstar developers who’ve served as heads of development on the new Impressive Nicking Vehicles, has asserted as much to Bloomberg as part of a lengthy article on the making of the game. “The engine, the tools and the team we’ve built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly,” he claimed “I feel confident that we can build on top of this and go more sideways than upwards to build more compelling content.”

“We foundationally changed a lot of stuff on this project,” fellow lead Aaron Garbut added. “But now it’s done, and we’re not going to rip it apart.”

Basically, the pair are suggesting their next game isn’t going to take the eight years GTA 6 has to make it from the embryonic stages of development to release. That might be the case, but it’s worth noting that in the same article, Garbut appears to indicate similar logic was used in the late 2010s to justify Rockstar focusing all of their attention on finishing mammoth western Red Dead Redemption 2, rather than dedicating more resources to get GTA 6 on the go at the same time finishing touches were being put on Arthur Morgan’s burly chest hairs and his horse’s dynamically contracting bollocks.

“As that game’s ambitions grew, Nelson realized he needed to mobilize most of Rockstar, including the senior leadership, to help finish it,” the Bloomberg report puts it. “That meant pushing GTA 6 back several years, but the benefit was that everything they built could ‘pay off when we get to the game,’ Nelson says.” So, assuming GTA 6 wouldn’t have taken even longer then the vastly lengthy stretch it has without the aid of work already done on RDR2, it’d seem that hope of supercharging its development with help from cowboy tech hasn’t expedited the process much.

To me, there’s perhaps a fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge that building bigger and more detailed games is always likely going to result in the humans making the thing needing more time to this train of thought. If we can only just get these magic tech beans planted here, albeit not AI-generated ones in this case, we can get this out way faster without having to spend all of the extra money it usually takes to accomplish such a thing. This next big push is the last one and then we’re home free to an easier life.

Rockstar are, of course, currently embroiled in employment tribunal proceedings over the firing of 34 staff last year, whom the company have accused of putting confidential info about the game at risk of leaking. The fired staff and IWGB Union have accused Rockstar of being motivated instead by a desire to union bust. Meanwhile, remaining devs at the studio have been pushing the company to voluntarily recognise the union they formed earlier this year.