Bloomberg: GTA 6 once spanned the Americas and lost years to Red Dead Redemption 2

Early plans for Grand Theft Auto 6 were much bigger than the game shipping next month, and it could have arrived years sooner, according to a new Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier. GameSpot and Polygon summarized the report on October 14.

From Project Americas to Leonida

Bloomberg reports that a small Rockstar team went to Miami in 2015 to start planning the game, which was then called Project Americas because it was meant to cover “big swaths of land across both North and South America.” That plan was later cut back to Miami and the area around it. In the finished game, that means Vice City and the wider state of Leonida, Rockstar’s version of Florida. GameSpot notes that the map is three times the size of the one in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption II.

Rockstar first intended to build GTA 6 at the same time as Red Dead Redemption 2. According to Bloomberg, development lead Rob Nelson ended up pulling most of the company onto the Western as its scope grew, senior leadership included, and that pushed GTA 6 back by several years. Nelson said Rockstar’s studios now work together on one game at a time instead of developing several in parallel.

Budget, staffing and delays

Rockstar wouldn’t give Bloomberg a budget figure. As reported by Polygon, though, head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe denied the popular rumor that the game cost more than $1.5 billion. Schreier still concludes that it is the most expensive game ever made, pointing to the size of the team and the length of development. According to Bloomberg, Rockstar had 2,441 employees across 12 offices in 2018 and now has about 4,711.

The report says complex NPC behavior caused at least one delay. After the game’s 2023 reveal, leadership realized those systems would take far more time and staff than planned. “The projections they were giving us were horrifying,” Nelson told Bloomberg. Head of development Phil Hooker said the team could have hit the old date, but the result wouldn’t have been the game it wanted to make.

According to Polygon, Bloomberg also writes that GTA 6 takes its tone more from Red Dead Redemption 2‘s realism than from GTA 5. It says the AI systems behind protagonists Jason and Lucia are traditional game AI, not generative tools.

GameSpot says the game was first due in 2025, then slipped to May 2026 and then to November. It is now set to launch November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.