Former Rockstar Dev Explains Why GTA 6 On PC Is Delayed

The first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 was finally officially revealed in December 2023, and it's everything fans hoped for, well, almost since the press release didn't mention a PC release.

In a classic Rockstar fashion, it seems GTA 6 will be a console exclusive at launch, with a PC release to follow after a year or two. The studio's last two releases - GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 had received a similar treatment, and GTA 6 will likely go that route as well. 

Naturally, this piece of info hadn't been well received by PC players, with many complaining about the inferior treatment from the studio once again. While there's no concrete answer to why GTA 6 is not releasing on PC, one former Rockstar employee has tried to explain why it's happening. 

"The reason why a PC port comes later and not the first thing that comes out, is because they [Rockstar] want to prioritize what sells," says Mike York, an ex-animator at Rockstar England. York further adds, "Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have. It sold more than any other console for the most part. Everybody’s playing PlayStation.”

It's no surprise that the majority of AAA game releases garner more money via console releases, and while it makes sense for Rockstar Games to prioritize GTA 6 on those platforms, there's more here than just that. 

According to York, "One of the main reasons why a PC port will take so long is because it’s different architecture and different components. “They [Rockstar] have to accommodate for all these different things that can happen. Because on a PlayStation and an Xbox, each one of those has one graphics card, and it’s the same graphics card, it’s the same architecture inside the box as every single PlayStation that’s shipped to millions of people. But when it comes to a PC, every single person has a different PC. They’re running it differently. They have different hardware in there. They have different CPUs and GPUs. The memory usage and the different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes hit a fail and mess up during different configurations."

"It’s hard to explain, but that’s what it boils down to. They [Rockstar] need to test the game more on PC than they would on Xbox or PlayStation. If you think about it, you already have to test the game a ton in order to get it to work. So a PC is even harder. You got to throw more resources at it. You have to test things a lot more. And when you’re doing the PC port you have to test things on multiple different hardwares, different GPUs. Not just one or two, but 10 or 20. There’s so many different configurations out there that you’ll just never be able to test them all. And there’s a lot of things that can go wrong once you release that PC port, because it just hasn’t been tested by millions of people. It’s only been tested by a thousand people at work. So you can only take it so far.”

Porting a AAA game like GTA 6 on a PC seems like a huge feat, and it's for the devs to take time as needed. The PC versions of both GTA 5 and RDR 2 were quite optimized at launch and felt like vastly superior experiences to their console counterparts. As such, it's best to give Rockstar Games the benefit of the doubt and let it take its time on Grand Theft Auto 6's PC version. 

GTA 6 is currently scheduled to release in 2025 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.