The year 2020 marked a pivotal inflection point in the development trajectory of Grand Theft Auto VI, as Rockstar Games formally transitioned the project from its pre-production and prototyping phases into full principal production. After years of preliminary work that began in 2014 following the release of Grand Theft Auto V, and early development that started in late 2018 once Red Dead Redemption 2 had shipped, Rockstar concentrated its global resources on what would become its most ambitious project (Wikipedia, 2025a). This transition coincided with one of the most disruptive global events in modern history — the COVID-19 pandemic — which forced the studio to fundamentally reorganise how it built games. The same year also saw the departure of co-founder and lead writer Dan Houser, the rebranding of acquired studios, and a deliberate scaling of the development team across Rockstar's worldwide network.
Principal production on Grand Theft Auto VI commenced in 2020, code-named Project Americas, marking the formal escalation from concept and prototyping to full-scale content creation (Wikipedia, 2025a). According to reporting by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the project was deliberately framed internally as "a moderately sized release" at launch that would expand over time, a strategic decision aimed at avoiding the punishing developer crunch that had plagued Red Dead Redemption 2 (Wikipedia, 2025a). This represented a cultural shift for Rockstar, whose prior productions had drawn extensive criticism for unsustainable working hours, as documented in Jason Schreier's October 2018 Kotaku investigation that found most current and former Rockstar employees had been asked or felt compelled to work nights and weekends, with many reporting average workweeks of 55 to 60 hours (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The COVID-19 pandemic struck precisely as principal production was ramping up, forcing Rockstar to pivot to remote work across its global studios. The disruption to game development pipelines — particularly motion capture, voice recording, and collaborative iteration — was substantial, and many industry analysts have linked the prolonged development timeline of Grand Theft Auto VI in part to pandemic-era constraints. Rockstar would later, in April 2024, request that employees cease remote work and return to offices "for productivity and security" during what it described as "the final stages of development", a move criticised by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain as contradicting earlier promises to maintain flexible working conditions (Wikipedia, 2025a). The pandemic also indirectly shaped Rockstar's broader cultural footprint: in May 2021 the company launched CircoLoco Records in collaboration with the Ibiza-based dance party Circoloco, partly in response to the hardships dance music had faced because of COVID-19 lockdowns (Wikipedia, 2025b).
To support principal production, Rockstar scaled its team aggressively throughout 2020. The company had already grown to more than 2,000 employees across all offices by 2018 (Wikipedia, 2025b), and during 2020 it continued consolidating its development capacity. In October 2020, Rockstar acquired the Scottish studio Ruffian Games and rebranded it as Rockstar Dundee, expanding its United Kingdom development presence beyond Rockstar North in Edinburgh and Rockstar Leeds (Wikipedia, 2025b). This acquisition complemented the May 2019 absorption of Dhruva Interactive into Rockstar India, providing additional Bengaluru-based capacity for the ambitious project (Wikipedia, 2025b). The scaling effort distributed Grand Theft Auto VI work across virtually every Rockstar studio worldwide, including Rockstar North, Rockstar Toronto, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Leeds, Rockstar New England, Rockstar India, and the newly formed Rockstar Dundee.
A significant personnel event of 2020 was the departure of co-founder Dan Houser, who left Rockstar Games on 11 March 2020 after taking an extended break following Red Dead Redemption 2 (Wikipedia, 2025b). His exit meant that Grand Theft Auto VI became the first main Grand Theft Auto game since the 1997 original — and the first overall since 2004's Grand Theft Auto Advance — not to be written by Dan Houser (Wikipedia, 2025a). This represented a notable creative transition for the franchise occurring at the exact moment principal production began.
2020 was the year Grand Theft Auto VI truly began as a full production, despite — and partly because of — the global upheaval surrounding it. Rockstar entered principal production with a deliberate anti-crunch philosophy, expanded its studio network through the Rockstar Dundee acquisition, and absorbed the dual shocks of COVID-19 lockdowns and the departure of its longtime lead writer. These foundations would shape the project for the next six years, ultimately contributing to its prolonged development timeline and its eventual November 2026 release date.
Schreier, J. (2018) 'Inside Rockstar Games' Culture Of Crunch', Kotaku, 23 October. Cited in Wikipedia (2025b).
Wikipedia (2025a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Rockstar Games. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Games (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
MacDonald, K. (2022) 'Rockstar owner issues takedowns after Grand Theft Auto VI leak', The Guardian, 19 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/19/rockstar-owner-issues-takedowns-after-grand-theft-auto-vi-leak (Accessed: 14 May 2026).