Former Rockstar Dev Explains Why GTA 6 Launches Later on PC

A former Rockstar developer has explained why Grand Theft Auto 6 isn’t launching on PC when it initially drops, with a release expected later down the line instead.

GTA 6 is arguably the most anticipated game of all time, with all eyes cast towards the November 19 release on XBOX Series X|S and PlayStation 5, but players on PC will have to wait a while longer.

This is nothing new for fans of Rockstar, which always releases its titles later on PC, and a former developer has explained why that is the case.

Former Dev Explains GTA 6’s Later PC Launch

Speaking to YouTuber KiwiTalkz, via IGN, former Rockstar Games producer John Ricchio explained that it’s easy to start with consoles and then move over to PC, rather than building a game for PC and then trying to scale it down.

“It’s always better to start with the constraints and then extend. 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 deoptimize or make things more shiny,” he said.

“It’s never any specific, you know, anti-any platform. It’s just, is it worth spending the time and effort to get something running on Switch, or something like that, or Wii, who knows? And I think you have to make those calls per game, and in a lot of cases, there are legitimate hardware limitations, right?

“But as time has gone on, I feel like the consoles are definitely closer, so it doesn’t quite feel as bad, but it just becomes about, ‘If you’re working on that, you’re not working on something else,’ usually. And so if you’re spending money on that, 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.”

There’s no definitive release window for GTA 6 on PC, but it took over a year and a half until the previous title in the series launched on PC, while Rockstar’s most recent release, Red Dead Redemption 2, came just over a year after the console launch.

Check out the most recent GTA 6 trailer below.

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