GTA 6's ten-year development cycle would be a "very bad bet" for anyone but Rockstar, says former Bethesda dev

Is anyone else nervous that GTA 6 won’t release this year? There’s something about the nature of the delays, the leaks that the game isn’t even content complete, and the employment lawsuits that Rockstar is currently embroiled in that makes me wonder if the industry-shaking RPG won’t see the light of day until 2027. I’m not the only one who’s nervous. Former Bethesda lead artist and current indie dev Nate Purkeypile believes that this scope of game could be “a very bad bet” for anyone but Rockstar.

While we eagerly wait for the GTA 6 release date, many are wondering whether Rockstar has bitten off more than it can chew. With a rumored billion-dollar budget and development cycle lasting over a decade, it had better be one of the greatest games ever made if Rockstar wants to recoup its expenses.

Purkeypile knows that this would be a huge risk for most studios, but reckons that Rockstar has the experience to make it work. “Rockstar is one of the only [studios] that [has] the track record to prove [it] can actually take [its] time on these games,” he says in an interview with Esports Insider.

He argues that, for many devs, these enormous projects “often just kind of fall apart,” even pointing to CD Projekt Red’s disastrous Cyberpunk 2077 launch after the studio had rapidly expanded and massively increased the scope of its Witcher 3 follow up.

“You need to build up to those bigger projects and a lot of the game industry crashes from too much money being thrown at studios because this one person worked on a successful thing once before,” he says. “You need a team that has all that knowledge and is used to shipping things together. That’s a very expensive bet, and I think it’s been proven to be a very bad bet, generally speaking.”

As someone who shipped countless triple-A games with Bethesda, including Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Skyrim, his opinion is worth a thing or two. While his debut indie project, The Axis Unseen, was an antithesis to most modern game design (and especially the Ubisoft map formula that pervades open world games to this day), Purkeypile has experience at every level of game design.

“Once you’re down the road, having proven successes many, many times, then you can start doing what Rockstar is doing,” he says. “But I think that takes a long time to get to that point.”

When questioned on the future of the Grand Theft Auto series, Purkeypile says he’d love to see a theoretical GTA 7 set in Texas, with more immersive sim elements thrown in. The latter would certainly please any Arkane Enjoyers, as well as those who splash the big bucks in GTA Online roleplay servers and the like.

“Get Dallas and Austin in there,” he says. “You’ve got a nice clash of the cowboy vibe of Dallas and all the crazy hippies in Austin. There’s a lot of weird stuff there. San Antonio is super cool, too.

“I think if they added more elements of an immersive sim, it would still have the whole massively cinematic focus as well, and there is a proven appetite for that sort of gameplay among GTA players.”

I like his ideas, but if development cycles keep spiralling at this rate, we won’t see GTA 7 until the 2040s. Who knows what game development will look like then? Looking to more pressing matters, however, if this veteran triple-A developer has confidence that Rockstar can pull off GTA 6 like no other studio can, then I’m even more excited for its release. Whenever that may be.