It’s Going To Be A Long Wait For GTA6
Grand Theft Auto 5 was released in 2013. That was seven years ago, so surely we should be hearing something about GTA6 very soon, right? Think again. According to a new report from industry watchdog Jason Schreier, pre-production has only just begun on the next Grand Theft Auto game. “Rockstar’s next big project is still early in development,” Schreier reports.
The intervening years have mostly been spent creating Red Dead Redemption 2 and its DLC. Even with all that time, AND multiple delays, Rockstar had to resort to massive crunch to finish RDR2 (a fact Jason exposed). What this points to is the current state of the AAA industry: a company of Rockstar’s size can only make one game at a time, it takes at least five years to make that singular game, and it can’t even make that singular game in all that time without a ridiculously tight schedule and overworked staff.
In other words: AAA games have simply become too big. The cost is too great, both in resources and in employee health. Something has to give, and Schreier reports Rockstar is considering a scaled-down approach to their next game.
“One plan that management has laid out for the next game, a new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, is to start out with a moderately sized release (which, by Rockstar’s standards, would still be a large game) that is then expanded with regular updates over time, which may help mitigate stress and crunch.”
I can’t speak for every fan of the series, but I’m fine with this. The pointless race for graphics needs to end. I can do without having 100,000,000 individually rendered pebbles on the ground of every pathway if it means getting the games sooner with less cruelty on the production end. And it’s something other companies should start thinking about too.