Former Rockstar developer shares the reason why GTA 6 is not launching on PC

by Danny Craig ·

Rockstar Games

Mike York, a former Rockstar Games developer between 2012 and 2017, has explained why Grand Theft Auto and the studio's other titles aren't released on PC alongside consoles.

The details:

York posted a video to YouTube detailing the development of GTA PC ports, stating that sales priority is the main reason why the game will hit consoles much sooner. "They want to prioritize what sells," York said. "Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have. It sold more copies than any other console, for the most part, everybody is playing PlayStation."
Since the PlayStation version of GTA is expected to sell the most copies, development on the PS3 version of GTA V was prioritized when York worked at the studio, with the Xbox 360 version being worked on concurrently. The PC version of the game, on the other hand, is "kind of the version that's in the background" as it's used to build the game, but it's not polished at all and only becomes a focus once the console versions are finished, with personnel issues also affecting development.
Another issue that developers face when creating a PC port of a game is having to account for hundreds of differences in hardware with a variety of options to allow a game to run as expected. “On a PlayStation and an Xbox, each one of those has one graphics card, and it's the same graphics card, it's the same architecture inside the box as every single PlayStation that has shipped to millions of people," York explained. "When it comes to PCs, every single person has a different PC. They are running it differently, they have different hardware in there, they have different kinds of CPUs and GPUs."
GTA VI is scheduled to be released in 2025 on Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and while Rockstar has not confirmed a PC port, there is no doubt that it will arrive at some point. GTA V took over a year and a half to become available on PC in 2015, but with PC gaming becoming more popular, we can expect GTA VI much sooner.

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