Bloomberg Businessweek Goes Inside Rockstar North, and GTA 6 Gets Its Real Making-Of Story

Bloomberg Businessweek has published its cover story, The Making of Grand Theft Auto 6, built on something no outlet has had before: a day inside Rockstar North in Edinburgh in late September, with reporter Jason Schreier interviewing the senior staff running the project. Schreier watched studio head Rob Nelson play but was not allowed to touch a controller himself. The demo portions of his account are already folded into our relationship and robbery guides; this page covers the history, the people and the numbers.

The story arrived with two new screenshots. One shows Jason and Lucia at the Thrillbilly Mud Club, a scene recognisable from the 2022 leak footage, which some readers take as Rockstar’s quiet joke about the whole affair. The other puts a green supercar outside the Ocean View Hotel under a police helicopter spotlight.

The report settles one of the oldest arguments in GTA 6 speculation. Rob Nelson and other senior staff made their first research trip to Miami in 2015, when the project carried the codename Project Americas and envisioned big stretches of land across North and South America. That scope was cut to Miami and the surrounding Florida stand-in that became Leonida. The multi-city and Cuba rumours of 2020 now read like echoes of plans already abandoned, though the report confirms none of those leaks individually.

The shrinking had a cause with a name: Red Dead Redemption 2. The western expanded until it needed most of the company, pushing serious GTA 6 production back to around 2019, by which point the story outline centred on a Bonnie and Clyde inspired criminal couple robbing their way through a fictional Miami. Nelson says the experience changed how Rockstar builds games permanently. Instead of separate offices developing different titles in parallel, the whole company now works on one game at a time.

The most revealing material covers the years Rockstar spent deciding how much Red Dead Redemption 2 realism belongs in a GTA. Developers debated whether buying a beer should mean taking it from the fridge and paying at a counter, and whether a stat-boosting sandwich should require buying ingredients first. These are presented as design questions, not confirmed mechanics, and they map onto the friction-versus-flow argument our leaked mechanics guide has tracked for a year.

Some of the simulation ambition survived intact. Nightclubs are described as detailed simulations with individually modelled crowds and lighting that runs with the music, and one developer told Schreier the game scripts how much Jason or Lucia sweat depending on exertion, dancing included. The COVID years nearly broke the plan: motion capture studios shut, staff scattered to home offices, some senior designers quit, and Nelson calls the period a dark one for the project.

Rockstar grew from 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018 to roughly 4,710 across twelve offices by August 2026, and the report is careful to note not all of them work on GTA 6. A dedicated Los Angeles studio was set up with writers, directors and producers mostly to handle the enormous volume of NPC dialogue and performance the world requires.

On money, the company gave Schreier a denial instead of a figure. Head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe says the claim that the game cost more than the Burj Khalifa, a building with a reported 1.5 billion dollar construction cost, is not true. Schreier’s own assessment is that GTA 6 is probably the most expensive game ever made regardless. The commercial maths explains why nobody blinks: analysts in the report project 40 million copies and more than three billion dollars of revenue within four months, against GTA 5’s 230 million lifetime copies and an estimated half a billion dollars a year from GTA Online. The online component is expected in 2027, and the developers in the room were not discussing it.

After the first trailer in December 2023, Rockstar’s leadership genuinely believed 2025 would hold. The development team asked for more time, and it fell to Kolbe to phone Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick, first to move the date to May 2026 and then again to land on November 19. Zelnick admits the second call shocked him, but told Bloomberg that delaying a game is a sensible use of time and money when it needs the room. Phil Hooker’s explanation avoids drama entirely: no single catastrophic problem, just many moving pieces that took longer than expected. His status report is the closest thing to reassurance Rockstar has offered all year, a bug board with more green than red and a date that is, in his words, looking very real.

The report also sketches how the studio runs since Dan Houser left in 2020: Nelson, Hooker and Aaron Garbut lead development jointly, and some staff perceived the trio as occasionally indecisive, a characterisation Nelson disputes. Three heads replacing one auteur is the structural story of this Rockstar generation, addressed on the record for the first time.

The September 2022 breach, where an attacker phished a way into Rockstar’s Slack and published dozens of unfinished gameplay videos, still defines daily life at the studio. By 2024 every employee was required in the office five days a week with remote access cut entirely, a policy Kolbe says will be reconsidered after release. It has not stopped the bleeding: the report notes employee frustration that footage kept surfacing anyway, familiar to anyone following the Cyberleek saga.

The darkest thread is the dismissal of 34 employees last year, accused by Rockstar of sharing confidential information on Discord. Most were associated with a group seeking to form a union, the group disputes Rockstar’s account, and the Glasgow tribunal weighing the dispute is expected to conclude this month. On working conditions more broadly, the report describes added staff, stricter scheduling and paid time off in exchange for overtime since Red Dead Redemption 2, with Kolbe conceding things have improved without being perfect.

Strip the anecdotes away and the story settles four things: Project Americas was real and continental, both delays came from the development floor rather than the boardroom, the budget remains a denial rather than a number, and the couple systems are real enough that a reporter watched them run unscripted, which is why our wanted and money guides lean on his account.

One forward-looking line deserves its own sentence: Rockstar’s leaders say the engine, tools and team built for GTA 6 mean the next release will not take another eight years, comparing the position to building Vice City on GTA 3’s foundation. The full development history, from Project Americas to the launch window, lives in our development guide, updated alongside this article.