When Rockstar launched ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ in 2018, it had 2,441 employees. In August this year it was 4,711, spread across 12 offices. The figures are official and appear in a report where the studio leadership talks openly about how ‘GTA VI’ was made, which has just released its launch trailer. This is the first time that so many details about the company and its mastodon have been revealed and it gives some juicy information about the guts of the brand.
ghost of crunch. The industry has laid off tens of thousands of developers since 2023, and Rockstar’s parent company is on that list: Take-Two announced in April 2024 a plan to cut its workforce by about 5% and save more than $165 million a year. But against that backdrop, Rockstar took a step in the opposite direction with strong growth in India and a new office in Los Angeles. Part of that hiring had to do with not repeating the hellish development of ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ with 60-hour weeks. Jennifer Kolbe, head of publishing, promised staff that GTA VI would not be based on the ending crunch. He himself admitted that the results “were not perfect.”
One solution was to add more people with a more realistic calendar and days off in exchange for overtime. And yet, they lacked hands: when they calculated how many NPCs they would have to write and animate, the forecasts were “terrible,” and Rockstar set up a studio in Los Angeles dedicated solely to it. Phil Hooker, another development head, linked the disruption to the date change. The game promised for 2025 was moved to May 2026 and then to November 19. Kolbe recalled that Take-Two CEO Strauss-Zelnick received a second postponement request to “say you’re kidding.”
money Take-Two’s financial year closes on March 31, so ‘GTA VI’ has four and a half months to convert its 2027 accounts. In May, the company forecast net reserves between $8 billion and $8.2 billion for the entire company, compared to $6.72 billion a year earlier. According to Take-Two, it expects Rockstar’s reserve weight to go from 16% to 36%, and they project sales of 40 million copies that year. Bank of America estimates $3.44 billion in revenue. What’s not clear is the cost: Kolbe denied rumors that it exceeded 1.5 billion.
Expectations rise. YouTube had over 93 million views within 24 hours of the first trailer from December 2023. In August this year, the 27-minute trailer released exclusively on Netflix topped the weekly list of English-language movies with 31.1 million views and was number one in 83 of the 83 countries measured by the platform.
The price of privacy. In September 2022, an attacker broke into the company’s Slack and stole and then leaked dozens of half-finished gameplay videos. Due to this, since 2024 the employees are working in the office for five days and ‘GTA VI’ developers cannot access the server from outside. Nevertheless, another leak occurred in August, just before the premiere on Netflix. (more or less) related, in October 2025 Rockstar fired 34 people, most of them registered with a union called the IWGB. The company alleged that the reason for the dismissal was that they shared confidential information on Discord.
And when? Hooker argues that the engine, tools and equipment developed for ‘GTA VI’ will allow new sequels to be made more quickly, and he puts ‘GTA: Vice City’ as a reference, which is based on ‘GTA III’ in less than a year. And there’s already a first place to test it, and we’ll see it in 2027: GTA Online, which the article estimates brings in about $500 million a year.
In Xataka | We finally have the launch trailer for ‘GTA VI’ and it’s every bit as spectacular as you’d expect
