GTA 6’s PC release may come sooner than anticipated, according to former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, because Rockstar and publishers Take-Two will be concerned about losing money to unofficial generative AI clones of the PS5 version, once it launches on 19th November. In general, Vermeij thinks that how to avoid having your games duplicated by chatbot herders is “the big question” right now for devs and publishers, particularly those who don’t have the means to enforce their intellectual property dominions as vehemently Take-Two do for Grand Theft Auto.
Speaking to me during a wide-ranging chatathon, Vermeij reflected on the early days of Grand Theft Auto development at Rockstar North in the 90s, and how the Noel-and-Liam-Gallagher-esque relationship between PC and console gaming has evolved. He shared a sweary anecdote about the company’s difficulties getting the original GTA 1 to look the business on Sony’s PlayStation.
“I didn’t work on GTA 1 and 2, but I worked for the company at the time, and I was actually right next to the GTA 1 team, so I was able to follow it,” he said. “So they worked on PC and then an external company in Dundee did the PlayStation version. Which was really weird, because like, PCs were so much more powerful – still the case, but in those days, it was even more so.
“And I remember, at the time, the GTA team was definitely the most rowdy of all of the teams,” Vermeij continued. “And there was one particular day where they sent the PC build away, and then it came back from the PlayStation people, and they had cut down all the textures from 256 colours to 16 colours, and my god, the artist was just going around and swearing – ‘what the fuck did they do to our textures, I can’t believe it, we can’t release this shite’. So it always has been that sort of awkward relationship between PC and the console. So in those days, it was like PC first and then console second, even though that didn’t really make much sense for the sales, because the PlayStation versions sold way better.”
When it came time to develop GTA 3, Rockstar “flipped that around”, Vermeij went on, creating the console versions first. “Clearly the PC market has sort of grown, caught up with the console market, but there’s still that same mindset,” he said. Most publishers prefer to release all versions at once, Vermeij added, “because then there’s only one marketing campaign they have to pay for.” GTA lives by its own rules, however. “I guess it’s less of an argument for them because the game is just so big, so they just kind of always left it that way. And for developers, it’s way easier to just do one version at a time. So, you know, that makes sense.”
The arrival of generative AI threatens to throw all this to the winds. Tools such as Reverse Engineer Anything allow for speedy unofficial ports or “slopcomps” of console games on PC, despite warnings from seasoned recomp developers that using genAI for this purpose wrecks the community aspect of unofficial porting, and results in illegible “bruteforce” code rather than preserving some understanding of how the original game was made.
“It really has changed the world,” Vermeij observed, “and I think I would be concerned, if I was Rockstar, that somebody would just take the PS5 version and get AI to change it to PC, which won’t be won’t be as good as their effort, but it could still also hurt their sales. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an effort to get [the releases] a little bit closer together. Obviously, I don’t really know what they’re thinking.”
GTA 6 is, according to Rockstar and Take-Two at least, an enormously fiddly production, costing hundreds of millions of dollars over eight years in development. Nonetheless, Vermeij thinks current genAI tools are “probably” capable of pulling off a port. “It will take a long time. It actually, physically takes hours and hours and hours to do these things. And it will take a bunch of tokens and everything, so it would probably cost like, tens of thousands of dollars in tokens. But like, you know, if it’s GTA, I think people are gonna try it.”
There are already signs that genAI PC port goldrushers are ready to pounce on GTA 6. Just today, Ars Technica reported on efforts to yassify the game’s PS5 trailer footage by piping it through a stronker PC graphics card and using Nvidia’s DLSS 5 to apply extra layers of gloss.
Vermeij himself left Rockstar way back in 2009 and is now an indie developer. His current early access project is Plentiful, a hexagonal god sim with an emphasis on water physics. It uses “AI-assisted machine translation for localization”, but not for “gameplay content, art, or audio”. Vermeij is, in general, interested in generative AI despite the surging tide of slopcomp ports. Smaller indie developers are, of course, more vulnerable to the financial fallout from having their work unofficially cloned by generative AI, but Vermeij thinks it’s an existential worry for megacorps like Take-Two as well.
“I don’t really see how you could protect against that, to be honest,” he told me in closing. “I don’t see it. But a big company like Take-Two, they would be able to get the lawyers on the case, and maybe, like, you said, for a big game, maybe the AI doesn’t really do a particularly good job. But yeah, I mean, it’s a brave new world. What was the case before, is that there’s so much effort in developing the game, that it is not possible to rip it off, and that’s completely changed now. So, yeah, we’re going to have to see in the next couple of years, how that’s going to pan out.”
The latest rumour-mongering places GTA 6’s PC release sometime in early 2027. In other news, Rockstar staff are soon to formally vote on whether to apply for union recognition. If the organisers carry the day, the resulting union could encompass nearly all the company’s UK staff below management level.
