Some people are unsurprisingly not happy that Grand Theft Auto 6 won’t be launching for PC, but a former Rockstar Games employee has offered an explanation for why a PC version isn’t being prioritized.
Mike York worked as an animator at Rockstar from 2012 to 2017; his credits include Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. He’s long since moved on (he’s currently employed at Highwire Games—the Six Days in Fallujah studio), but decided to post a YouTube video on Dec. 11 responding to complaints about GTA 6‘s lack of a PC port.
In the video, York explains that there are multiple reasons for GTA 6‘s lack of PC port; the first being that a PC port isn’t as much of a priority for Rockstar Games. He brings up his own experiences working on GTA 5, which didn’t see a PC release until two years after the console version, saying how, at the time, Rockstar was prioritizing getting the game on PlayStation 3 since the PlayStation platform was the bigger seller.
“… They want to prioritize what sells. Most of the time, especially in the past … PlayStation was THE console to have. So what the developer would do is focus all their energy on making sure the PlayStation port worked really good,” York says in the video. Given how phenomenally well the PlayStation 5 is selling (more than 40 million units worldwide since its 2020 launch, according to GamesIndustry.biz), Rockstar is likely taking the same approach, deciding it’s more important to get the game working on consoles before PC.
Although York acknowledges that PC gaming is becoming more and more popular, he adds that developing a game for the platform is more difficult since, unlike consoles, not everyone has the same kind of PC and thus has different architecture: “They’re running it differently, they have different hardware in there, they have different kinds of CPUs and GPUs … the memory usage and the different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes hit a fail and mess up during different configurations. … They need to test the game more on PC than they would on Xbox or PlayStation.”
This, combined with needing to check for bugs and add general polish, optimizing the experience, and a general lack of resources and manpower, ultimately means PC ports are far more difficult to develop. If Rockstar was willing to launch a PC version the same day as the console versions, then GTA 6 probably would be coming out far later than 2025. The wait for it has been long enough (GTA 5 came out 10 years ago!), and fans would no doubt only be more annoyed if they had to wait till 2027 or even beyond that for GTA 6
York concludes his video by simply asking people to be patient with the developer: “Just try to give them the benefit of the doubt … let the developers know it’s okay to take their time so they can deliver the best game they can to you.”
