What Comes After GTA 6 for Rockstar Games?

Grand Theft Auto VI launches in a matter of months, and the entire industry is staring at November 19 like it is a finish line. For Rockstar Games, it isn't. If anything, it's just another checkpoint, albeit a multi-billion-dollar one. Two thousand-plus people across its studios in Edinburgh, San Diego, Toronto, Lincoln, India and elsewhere won't clock out when the game ships. At that point, some of them will have already started working on whatever comes next, and that's the question nobody is really asking yet.

While everyone is busy arguing about the physical disc (or lack thereof) and talking about the possible pre-order numbers, it's become easy to forget that Rockstar is more than just the next Grand Theft Auto.

Over a decade ago, Rockstar shipped something significant every two or three years. Now, it ships one game every eight, and the gap has only ballooned between each GTA entry. The reason? Scale. Each Rockstar game costs more, takes longer, and employs more people than the last, and there is no obvious reason for that curve to suddenly flatten. However, as per former Rockstar North lead developer, Obbe Vermeij, AI could help in this regard.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has promised that AI has no involvement in the development of GTA 6 whatsoever, and that's most likely true for the most part. We can't say the same for the next GTA, or whatever Rockstar will work on next. Rockstar's parent company has also mapped out plans to release other non-GTA projects going forward, which suggests that we could get more releases from the studio before the decade ends instead of the other way around, just don't expect them to be more than just re-releases and remakes.

If we're being honest though, what comes next after GTA 6 is probably more GTA 6.

Grand Theft Auto Online generated somewhere north of eight billion dollars across its life from selling in-game money like Shark Cards and a bespoke subscription service in GTA+ to people who had already bought the game. Its successor is the actual business, and it is going to consume an enormous share of the company's people and attention for years. Add the FiveM acquisition, which strongly suggests official roleplay infrastructure is coming, and you are looking at a live-service operation big enough to be a studio's entire output on its own.

For the first two to three years after launch, minimum, GTA 6 and its online mode are Rockstar's project. There is no secret second game arriving in 2028. This is bad news for those hoping that Rockstar will dedicate its resources to Bully 2 next. Every year or two, someone will spot that Take-Two has renewed the Bully trademark and the internet briefly loses its mind. This means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Take-Two renews trademarks on things it has no intention of making, because letting an IP lapse means somebody else can grab it. It is legal housekeeping.

Also, Rockstar just doesn't do mid-sized games anymore. The math just doesn't work. Every developer you assign to a smaller project is a developer not working on something that could print hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A Bully sequel might sell well and be beloved and still be a catastrophically poor use of a team compared to shipping more GTA 6 Online content. The same logic buries basically every mid-scale Rockstar revival fans have been praying for since 2010. The era where Rockstar once released Red Dead Redemption, Bully, and Midnight Club, among others, within years of each other, is over.

Red Dead Redemption 3 is the one genuine possibility that could happen soonest, and we say "soon" because it hurts less than probably in the 2030s. Red Dead Redemption 2 sold in the tens of millions and is widely considered one of the best games ever made. Rockstar is smart enough not to let the franchise rot. However, it's also a perfectionist. RDR2 is a prequel that ends by setting up the first game. The story is a closed loop. A third entry needs a new protagonist, a new era, or a prequel to the prequel, and none of those are easy to do, especially now that Dan Houser is no longer around. If Rockstar follows the eight-year gap between the last two _Red Dead_s, and if pre-production is already quietly happening somewhere, the earliest realistic window is the early 2030s.

As for Grand Theft Auto 7, Take-Two's leadership, and Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, has made it clear that it won't release GTA as an annual franchise. If anything, it's this non-annual release that makes each release an event. Sure, maybe AI compresses the development time enough to shave a few years off. Even then, you're looking at seeing GTA 7 in the mid-2030s. A lot of the people reading this will have children old enough to play GTA 7 by the time it arrives, which is a genuinely strange thing to type.

There may not even be a next Rockstar single-player game in the way people imagine. The trajectory of this company over the past decade has been fewer games, longer gaps, bigger budgets, and an ever-larger share of revenue coming from one perpetual online product. Follow that line and the endpoint is a company that ships a prestige single-player game roughly once a decade as a marketing event for it, and never touches its old catalogue again.

Regardless of what happens, whatever Rockstar builds next will be built by a different company than the one that built RDR2 let alone GTA 6, and it will be doing it in an industry that is visibly wobbling around it. Predicting the next decade on the assumption that Rockstar stays exactly as it is just wrong.

Ultimately, the realistic assumption is for Rockstar to focus on GTA 6 Online for the next two to three years, followed by a new Red Dead in the early-to-mid 2030s, and maybe a new GTA in the back half of the 2030s. Maybe, just maybe, Rockstar will throw in a remaster or re-release or two. There's certainly enough demand and resources available for a Grand Theft Auto IV that's playable on modern platforms outside of a backwards compatible version. Bully 2 and a new Midnight Club are almost certainly never coming, however much we would all love to be wrong about that.

The next Rockstar single-player game is probably five to eight years away. The next GTA is probably a decade or more away.

But hey, we all waited thirteen years for this one. What's another thirteen years more for the next one, right?