Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI), scheduled for release on 19 November 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (Wikipedia, 2026), is widely expected to set a new benchmark for install footprint in the AAA open-world genre. Rockstar Games' two prior flagship titles — Grand Theft Auto V (2013, with the Enhanced and Legacy editions still in active service) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2, 2018/2019) — already demand storage allocations approaching or exceeding 150 GB on PC, and post-launch updates have pushed real-world installs significantly higher. Industry expectations for GTA VI's footprint range from 150 GB at launch to over 200 GB after expansions and online updates, driven by 4K texture streaming, lossless audio for licensed music, dense urban geometry covering the state of Leonida, and a persistent online mode modelled on Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO).
Red Dead Redemption 2 set a high-water mark for AAA install sizes when it arrived on PC in November 2019. Rockstar's official Steam listing lists a baseline storage requirement of 150 GB available space for both minimum and recommended configurations (Valve Corporation, 2019). At launch, the on-disk footprint was widely reported at around 109–112 GB, but successive title updates supporting Red Dead Online — including the Moonshiners, Naturalist, and Blood Money expansions — drove the installed size above 120 GB, with Rockstar continuing to recommend the 150 GB reservation to accommodate patch headroom and shader caches. On PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the game shipped on two discs precisely because no single dual-layer Blu-ray could hold the package, an unprecedented decision at the time and an early signal of how aggressively Rockstar's RAGE engine pipelines were consuming storage for uncompressed audio, high-resolution textures, and dense world data.
Grand Theft Auto V launched in 2013 with an install footprint of roughly 60–65 GB. Over more than a decade of GTA Online content drops — heists, Doomsday, Diamond Casino, Cayo Perico, the Criminal Enterprises and Contract updates — the installed size has crept upward, with the Legacy/Enhanced editions on Steam now occupying approximately 94–110 GB depending on platform and installed languages (Valve Corporation, 2025). The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X "Expanded and Enhanced" build released in March 2022 ships with reworked 4K assets, ray-traced reflections in performance-RT mode, and a separate GTAO partition, pushing the next-gen footprint past 90 GB at install before any post-release patches. This trajectory — a 60 GB launch ballooning to over 90 GB through online support — is the most relevant precedent for forecasting GTA VI's long-term storage demands.
While Rockstar has not published official system requirements at the time of writing, several technical indicators support an install estimate in the 150–200 GB range at launch on console:
A conservative baseline forecast is therefore ~150 GB at console launch, with a realistic ceiling of 200–225 GB within two years of release once seasonal online content, story DLC, and 4K HDR texture packs are accounted for. The PC release — historically delayed by 12–18 months for Rockstar titles — is likely to add further headroom for ultra-high-resolution texture options, plausibly approaching 250 GB in a fully-installed Ultimate Edition configuration.
For console owners, this footprint will exhaust a meaningful fraction of the PS5's 667 GB usable internal SSD or the Xbox Series X's 802 GB, effectively necessitating either a CFExpress/NVMe expansion card or aggressive uninstallation of other titles. For PC players, the 150 GB+ reservation Rockstar has demanded since RDR2 (Valve Corporation, 2019) will almost certainly be raised; SSD installation will be effectively mandatory for streaming the open world without LOD pop-in, as the engine relies on the same RAGE streaming architecture that already taxed mechanical drives in RDR2.