‘Grand Theft Auto 6’ has been in development for years now, and fans have been losing patience with every delay. The game was first leaked through a data breach in 2022 when over 90 clips of in-development gameplay footage hit the internet, and Rockstar confirmed it was real shortly after that. The first official trailer dropped in December 2023 with a Fall 2025 release window, but that got pushed to May 2026 and then pushed again to November 19, 2026, which is where it sits right now.
A lot of people figured Rockstar was just milking ‘GTA Online’ for as long as possible before bothering to move on. But a former developer who actually worked at the studio thinks the real reason is something else entirely, and it comes down to the engine powering the game.
Former Audio Designer Says Rockstar Has Probably Rebuilt The Entire Rage Engine For The Game
Rob Carr is a former audio designer at Rockstar who worked on ‘L.A. Noire,’ ‘Red Dead Redemption,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto 5,’ and ‘Red Dead Redemption 2,’ and he recently sat down with Kiwi Talkz to discuss his time at the studio.
When the conversation turned to why ‘GTA 6’ has taken so long, he said he believes the studio rebuilt the Rage Engine from the ground up, which is the proprietary technology Rockstar has used to build its games for over a decade. “I know nothing about it, other than the fact that they probably will have, given the time frame of how long it’s taken them to get to this stage, they’ve probably rebuilt the entirety of the Rage Engine,” Carr said and added that it was the only thing he could say with real confidence.
He went further and said he would be “amazed” if they had not rebuilt it because the architecture of technology has changed so much since ‘GTA 5’ first came out on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2013.
That is over 13 years ago now, and the hardware looks nothing like it did back then, which means the engine that powered ‘GTA 5’ would need a complete overhaul to handle what Rockstar is trying to do with the next game.
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Rockstar has always used in-engine footage for its trailers, which means what fans saw in the two ‘GTA 6’ trailers is actual gameplay quality and not pre-rendered cinematics, and if the engine really was rebuilt from scratch, that would explain both the visual jump and why the whole thing has taken this many years.
Take-Two’s CEO Keeps Saying November Is Locked In And Marketing Starts This Summer
The November 19 release date has been questioned by fans ever since it was announced because Rockstar already delayed the game twice, and nobody wants to get burned a third time. But Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has been unusually direct about it and has said publicly that marketing for ‘GTA 6’ will begin this summer, which is not something a company does if there is any real chance the date is going to move again.
For a publisher of that size to come out and reveal marketing timelines ahead of schedule is basically Zelnick telling people to stop worrying about another delay.
The other thing fans have been going back and forth on is how much the game is going to cost because Take-Two was one of the first companies to bump AAA game prices from $60 to $70 when the current console generation launched, and some analysts think ‘GTA 6’ could go even higher, with predictions sitting around the $100 mark.
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None of that has been confirmed, and it is still just guesswork, but it would not shock anyone given what Rockstar appears to be building here. Zelnick has pointed to Summer as when the marketing push kicks off, and it has been almost a full year since the second trailer, so if he is right about that timeline, then fans are probably only a few months away from seeing something new.
