Rockstar won’t say when GTA 6 hits PC, so I did the math

Grand Theft Auto VI will be, barring some sort of disaster, the biggest piece of media released in 2026. Doctor Doom, eat your cold, stony little heart out.

It’s practically guaranteed to be the largest game launch in years, possibly ever…despite being limited to an Xbox and PlayStation debut. The game is inevitably coming to PC later — like its fictional criminal heroes, Rockstar’s not going to leave that kind of money on the table. But how long will it take? That’s the question I’m pondering in this week’s newsletter.

A delayed PC release is pretty normal for this series. Naturally, neither developer Rockstar nor publisher Take-Two are talking. (Again, very similar to those bad guys you play as in GTA!) But we can use the company’s history of console-first releases and PC follow-ups, as well as a bit of industry scuttlebutt, to make a pretty good guess as to when GTA VI will arrive on your gaming PC.

A history of delayed PC releases

For the most relevant, empirical data, let’s take a look at the last 15 years of game releases from Rockstar. Specifically Rockstar North, the studio team within the company most directly responsible for shepherding the GTA franchise.

• Red Dead Redemption 2 — Console release October 2018, PC release November 2019. Gap: 1 year, 1 month
• Grand Theft Auto V — Console release September 2013, PC release April 2015. Gap: 1 year, 7 months
• L.A. Noire — Console release May 2011, PC release November 2011. Gap: 6 months

Max Payne 3 was released at the same time on consoles and PC in May 2012, but I’m counting that as something of an aberration, since Max Payne began as a PC franchise and it was developed as a more collaborative effort between multiple Rockstar teams.

We could go further back for more data, but I think we’d be losing a lot of relevance to the modern gaming landscape by looking at games as old as GTA IV in 2008 (1.5-year gap) and the original Red Dead Redemption (a full 14 years between the PS3/Xbox 360 release and the PC port, from a third-party team).

Based on those admittedly scattershot numbers, I would guess somewhere between one and two years between GTA VI’s November 19th, 2026 release on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S and a PC version. So, late 2027 to late 2028. But there are many more factors at play here.

Reasons for a later release

To paraphrase a modern master, “GTA VI is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the Ammu-Nation, but that’s just peanuts to GTA VI.”

Rockstar has been working on this game for over a decade. The total budget is estimated to surpass a billion US dollars. There are reportedly 7,500 people working on it across 11 different studios all over the world. (Minus thirty or so, possibly illegally fired for whispering about unions, which Rockstar views as a 6-star criminal offense.)

The graphics tech, the internal systems, the complexity of the game engine, and the sheer size and scope of the game are set to leave more recent open-world titles in the dust. It is probably going to be, without hyperbole, the most complex modern video game ever.

Complexity means that the work won’t stop in November when the game releases. Hundreds, possibly thousands of developers will keep working on the game, updating and fixing a myriad of bugs even as millions of people play it. Of course, hundreds, possibly thousands of developers may also be furloughed or laid off, as Take-Two finds them surplus to requirements after spending years on the biggest video game release in history. Working in the AAA video game industry is, if I haven’t made this clear yet, kind of a nightmare these days. I can sympathize.

But yeah, with GTA VI increasing in complexity by an order of magnitude over Rockstar’s last open-world release RDR2, it’s reasonable to suspect that it might take longer than usual for the game to make the leap from console to PC. Exactly how long will probably depend on how solid the game is upon release.

Reasons for a sooner release

Video games, even games released on consoles and phones and YouTube, etc., are developed on PCs. And these days, they’re made to be cross-platform from the ground up. Even if Rockstar wants to wait a year or more to release GTA VI for Windows, it’s planning for that eventuality right now.

The engine that Rockstar is using is called RAGE, the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine. It’s been around for twenty years, getting its first showcase in a minor table tennis game that was little more than a tech demo, before being used for GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3, GTAV, and RDR2. This is a system that’s been around the block a time or two, and Rockstar knows how to make the RAGE engine hum on a PC.

If Rockstar has been allocating its resources correctly, it shouldn’t take a huge amount of time to get GTA VI ready for a PC release, even if they’ve spent years optimizing it for the PlayStation and Xbox. That’s the practical side of the equation.

What about the more economic side of things? There’s an obvious motivation to get a PC version out soon: Money. Aside from the obvious desire to simply sell copies of the game ($100 USD a pop if you want the “real” version at launch!), Take-Two will want a PC release within a reasonable window of the console release in order to get sales in while players are still excited. It’s a delicate balance between spacing it out to get an extra copy sold to mega-fans who have both a console and a gaming PC, and striking while the iron is hot.

There’s another factor at play here: The RAM crunch. The same “AI”-driven market forces that are driving up the prices of years-old game consoles in an orgiastic explosion of unrestricted capitalism are even worse on the PC. In the last year, at least a chunk of players who might have bought or upgraded a gaming PC just for GTA VI have been priced out of the market by ever more expensive RAM, storage, and graphics cards.

And since AI companies are exerting more direct control over governments and the economy at large, that trend isn’t likely to reverse before a PC release. There have been some musings about Take-Two pushing the PC release up specifically because of hardware woes, though if there’s any actual data to base those guesses upon, it hasn’t been shared.

The sooner Take-Two can get the game onto PC, the more people will be able to play it. Wait too long, and a big part of the profitable equation will disappear. That’s even more important for the inevitable multiplayer follow-up — according to leaked information, GTA Online is still making over a million dollars every day almost 13 years after it was released.

My best guess: Holidays 2027

Gathering all that data and a bit of expertise on the gaming industry and market forces, and pointing out that I’m just a keyboard jockey who likes to read and watch these trends, my final guess is that GTA VI will hit Windows PCs before the end of 2027. Preferably sometime in late October to early December, the blockbuster months for video games, to give people time to play them over those end-of-the-year holidays.

I’d guess that after the initial console release of the game and the usual blitz of bug fixes and performance improvements, Rockstar will split its efforts between preparing the PC version and the incredibly lucrative online multiplayer mode, complete with microtransactions and all that jazz. The company will try to get a PC release and an upgraded version of GTA Online out at around the same time, though Online could hit consoles sooner if Take-Two has been hitting that gas pedal especially hard.

2026 has been an absolute slaughterhouse of a year for anyone who wants PC gaming hardware (and electronics in general), and 2027 isn’t looking much better. If GTA VI is going to be as difficult a game to run as it appears — console versions are targeting 30 FPS even on the top-end PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X — you’ll need some monster hardware to make it look pretty. Keep it in mind, and good luck finding upgrades if you need them.

Cool stuff from around the web

• US customs agent swiped chips and RAM: High tech has always been a lucrative target for smugglers. But it looks like with the RAM crunch in full swing, even inspectors can’t resist the urge to pawn some hardware. One got busted swapping in lower-priced PC components to US government orders, selling the more expensive parts for cash.
• This OLED ultrawide is great at work and gaming: MSI’s new 34-inch OLED monitor is pretty reasonable at $749, despite a slightly slow 144Hz refresh rate. But with a flat (non-curved) panel, a built-in KVM, and a penta-tandem panel for clearer text, it’s designed to be a solid choice for regular PC tasks as well.

• Steam Controller mod turns game audio into haptic feedback: Not all games feature vibration feedback, and not all of those do it very well. But this mod can use the Steam Controller’s excellent vibe motors to give feedback for all in-game audio, an interesting idea for accessibility and general gaming experience.
• Super Smash Bros Melee gets decompiled for PC: For a gamer of a certain age, there’s no better fighting game than Smash Bros. on the GameCube. A dedicated team spent years breaking the game down and building it back up for a native PC release. Get ready for No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination…in 4K 240FPS.
• This ThunderBolt 5 eGPU can handle an RTX 5090: External GPUs are a great way to powert up a laptop or handheld gaming PC. This new model from UGreen can handle the biggest, baddest desktop graphics cards on the market, with plenty of bandwidth thanks to USB 4.0, Thunderbolt 4, OcuLink, and 850 watts of power. It’s also shockingly reasonable at $450.

Game pick of the week: Haste

It’s weird to find a game that’s both incredibly fast…and sort of chill at the same time. But Haste is that game. You’re an adorable little multiversal postal delivery woman, who can inexplicably run about as fast as the average Mobius resident. You’re zooming through tranquil floating islands, trying to find the most optimal path to get to your next world.

Despite the breakneck pace, actually playing Haste is shockingly simple. Your only real controls are direction and the angle of descent, with the point being to touch down close to parallel to the ground to maintain your speed. There’s no jumping (Zoe does that automatically) and almost no combat. Incidentally, it’s almost impossible to get a feel for this game from screenshots: Watch the trailer.

Between the ultra-smooth motion, the chill music, and the simple but effective visuals, this is a game that runs on vibes. It’s been compared to Sonic, but to me it feels like an old-school snowboarding game with the tricks and the competition taken out. I’ve been having a blast playing it on the Steam Machine.

Haste has a free demo so you can get a handle on the unconventional controls, and a post-release update added co-op play. It’s $20 on Steam, also available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch.