“It’s not that we don’t care about PC” – Former Rockstar developer suggests why GTA 6 is only coming to consoles at launch

GTA 6 is looming like that monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, casting its fearsome shadow over the games industry and probably also scaring some monkeys. But PC players won’t be able to join in the fun when Rockstar Games’ mega-sequel launches on 19th November, and former studio producer John Ricchio – who worked on the likes of GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption, and Max Payne 3 – has shared some insight into why that may be.

Speaking in a lengthy, all-encompassing chat with YouTuber KiwiTalkz (thanks IGN), Ricchio explained that while many developers have traditionally favoured a PC-first approach and then scaled down to consoles, “It just causes so [many] problems down at the end”. Instead, as is seemingly Rockstar’s approach, it’s better to start with consoles and their “constraints”, because “shrinking is a lot harder than extending … It’s way harder to make your game performant than it is to just be like ‘Oh, we’ve got extra room? Cool, we can de-optimise some things, or make them more shiny.'”

Ricchio also noted, “It’s never any specific anti-any platform [thing]” but rather a question of resources: “Is it worth spending the time and effort to get something running on [different machines]? … It just becomes about, ‘If you’re working on that, you’re not working on something else,’ usually.”

By way of example, he recalled that Rockstar produced an early PC build of Red Dead Redemption while it was developing the console versions back in 2010 – some 14 years before the acclaimed game would eventually get a PC release – to see how much work it would take. “It’s not that we don’t care about PC; it was just, ‘Is it worth spending time getting a PC port going versus working on GTA 5’. It’s always those conversations.”

“If you’re spending money on that,” Ricchio elaborated, “you’re not spending money on something else. And so that’s where the business case has to be there. There has to be enough of a business reason to do some of those ports, or the lift has to be so light that it’’s like, ‘Oh, it’ll be super easy to do.’ And it’s rarely super light; there’s always something that you’ve got to do.”

Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive have remained cagey about a PC version of GTA 6, although the assumption is it’ll follow a similar trajectory to GTA 5, arriving at a later date – although hopefully a little more promptly than the 18-month wait PC players endured for that game. PS5 and Xbox Series X/S players, meanwhile, can head to Vice City and beyond starting 19th November – just don’t expect a proper physical, on-disc release.