Activision is reportedly working on a big, new, ambitious open-world game and the internet has already decided it is coming for Grand Theft Auto VI - or at least trying to. The studio is Elsewhere Entertainment, an Activision outfit announced in 2024 and based in Warsaw, Poland. According to sources, it is building a narrative-driven AAA project and the people behind it are veterans from CD Projekt Red, the studio behind Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, along with Naughty Dog, Ubisoft and Bungie.
If true, it is a real change of direction for Activision, a company whose biggest franchise, Call of Duty, is built on tightly scripted linear design rather than open sandboxes. With Activision and Microsoft behind it, the money and infrastructure are not in doubt. The existence of the project itself, however, is.
Job postings point to scalable animation systems for emergent gameplay, contextual NPC behavior and a world that reacts to what players do. It essentially describes a third-person action-RPG with living systems and NPCs that remember your decisions, along with factions and locations that shift in response. Other reports add vehicles, parkour, mixed melee and gun combat, partial destructibility and some multiplayer.
For what it's worth, the studio itself has not called this a Grand Theft Auto rival. In fact, it hasn't called "it" anything at all. Activision hasn't even announced the title yet and Elsewhere has never positioned the game against Rockstar Games.
GTA 6 vs Activision's Elsewhere Project
Factor | Rockstar, GTA 6 | Elsewhere Entertainment |
|---|---|---|
Team size | Roughly 4,700 | An estimated 51 to 200 |
Time invested | Around eight years | About two years as a studio |
Open-world experience | Decades across the GTA series | First open-world IP |
Status | Launching November 19 | Unannounced, no title or date |
The ambition is real, the gap in scale and experience is not small.
With that said, the scale it would need to match is staggering. Rockstar grew to roughly 4,700 people to finish GTA 6, up from about 2,400 when it shipped Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, with the large majority in development and QA. We covered how it nearly doubled its workforce and built a whole Los Angeles studio just for NPCs and how the game took around eight years and multiple delays to reach this point.
Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive funded all of it, handing Rockstar unlimited budget to pour all its resources into a single game. Elsewhere is nowhere near that yet. Public estimates put the studio at somewhere between 51 and 200 people and it has only existed for about two years, with plenty of roles still open. Microsoft money can close part of that gap fast, through outsourcing, extra hires and tech support.
The core team clearly knows how to build high-end games. The harder gap is time and institutional muscle. GTA-level density, reactivity and content volume usually take far bigger teams, pipelines refined across several games and many, many years of mistakes and cut content. Most big-budget GTA rivals have fallen short on exactly that systemic depth even with money to spend. Rockstar did not reach this level overnight, it spent decades and several genre-defining games getting here.
Activision's interest in this space is not new. The company already said GTA 6 will help Call of Duty by pulling lapsed players back to their consoles, even as it moved Call of Duty out of November to avoid the launch. It also took flak for an AI-generated GTA 6 parody in Call of Duty that fans called lazy. Building its own open-world game is the logical next step for a publisher that appears to see where the audience is heading.
None of this means the game will flop. A strong, distinctive open-world game from this team with enough time and budget will work, especially if it carves out its own flavor instead of copying Rockstar beat for beat. For now, what it becomes remains unknown. What's clear is that GTA 6 will arrive on November 19 as the game everyone else is still chasing and avoiding.