Don’t expect to see the game any time soon, though. The studio’s last game was 2018’s masterful Red Dead Redemption 2, which took eight years to develop, a long and exhausting production cycle that Kotaku suggests was a result of the “last-minute rewrites and overhauls” by Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who left the company in February. The changes in direction led to 100-hour work weeks for the game’s writing team and “months worth of 55-to-60-hour weeks,” according to Kotaku.
GTA 6 as a “moderately sized release” could also enable Rockstar to release the game a little sooner than past Rockstar titles, which usually feature sprawling stories and huge open-world maps. The last game in the GTA series took five years to make.
Kotaku’s report will undoubtedly send a wave of excitement over Rockstar’s fanbase, which has been asking for a new installment in the GTA series for quite a while. There have been many rumors over the years about the next game’s existence but Kotaku is the first reliable source to confirm that Rockstar is working on another GTA.
Many other questions remain. Will the game take place in San Andreas or the franchise’s other major setting, the New York City-like Liberty City? Will it feature GTA 5‘s Trevor, Michael, or Franklin?