Mike York, a former Rockstar Games animator, has offered his estimate of how finished Grand Theft Auto VI is right now, saying that it is "80 to 90 percent" done and probably content complete, with the team most likely testing and polishing rather than building anything new.
Here are his words as directly quoted from his interview with covers.com:
“I would assume that they’re probably like 90% done on the game and they’re probably content complete, hopefully they are, I don’t know because I’m not over there.
A lot of times, you want to be content complete, meaning you’re not adding new animations, new features, new game mechanics, things like that. Hopefully, right now, they’re at the point where they’re testing everything like crazy, they’re playing the game like eight hours a day, even more, that’s what I’d think they’re doing.
York worked at Rocksta as an animator from 2012 to 2017, with credits on Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Redemption 2. He knows how Rockstar finishes a big game because he was there for the end stretch of one. He also left the studio years ago and has no involvement in GTA 6, which he says himself.
With that said, the key phrase here is content complete. It means the game has all of its pieces in place. Every mission, every character, every animation, every system is in the game. What remains is making all of it work properly, which is a completely different and often longer job than building it in the first place.
What "Content Complete" Actually Means
Stage | What It Means |
|---|---|
Content complete | Everything is in the game, nothing new is being added |
Polishing | Refining animations, visuals and feel across existing content |
Testing | Playing the game for hours to find and log bugs |
Bug fixing | Actually repairing everything testing uncovers |
Finished | All of the above done to the studio's standard, ready to ship |
The difference between a game being content complete and a game being finished.
A little while ago, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier was widely misreported as saying the game was 90 percent complete, when he had actually said he was 90 percent confident in the release date. s. York's comment is genuinely about development progress. Neither are Rockstar telling you anything. One is a reporter confident that the gaming is almost done, and the other is an ex-developer's educated guess.
Unfortunately, as much as we'd love to make much ado about these claims, a "90 percent done" estimate, this close to launch, tells you almost nothing useful, or at least, something we already somewhat don't know. Think about it. The game has a confirmed release date of November 19, it is four months out, and pre-orders are live. Of course it is mostly built. You can't just say a game is months from coming out, take pre-orders, lock a launch date, and all the time it's half-finished, especially if you're Rockstar, who has a reputation for settling for nothing short of perfection.
There is a useful piece of history here, too. York made strikingly similar comments back when GTA 6 was still targeting a 2025 release, saying the game was likely fully playable and deep in testing. He was not wrong about the state of the game, as far as anyone can tell, which proves the point that a game can find itself in a playable, content complete state and deep in testing, yet launch more than a year later because the polishing and the meeting of Rockstar's own standard is the part that takes the time.
To be fair, the game is probably close to done, in the specific and limited sense that most of it exists and the team is now in the long grind of making it shine.