Rockstar veteran Dan Houser recently participated in Lex Fridman's podcast. During the conversation, the interviewer asked what it was like to work under great pressure:
The expectations and hype around Grand Theft Auto 6 are just incredible. It was the same with GTA 5, GTA 4, and even earlier. And you and the team coped every time. How difficult was it to be creative under such pressure, when everyone expects the game to be a success?
Dan Houser talked about his approach — he tried to bring something new and at one point tried not to think about the financial side, but focused on the project:
....I try to just act, and in any creative work I behaved like this: "Well, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven't been exposed yet. Just try your best, and hopefully I won't be exposed this time." And if I can... If I can say: "I tried very hard on this work. I tried to do it honestly. I tried not to copy anyone. I probably did all of the above" [— that's enough], you know, I try to bring something new. And we, as a collective, have created something we are proud of. And that's enough... If you don't want to go crazy, or if I didn't want to go crazy, I couldn't sit and worry about the financial results. If we made something great and [the game] doesn't sell, that should be okay. Because the goal is to create something...
Then he continued and touched on the monetary side of the issue: when developing games, other people's money is used, and it needs to be returned somehow.
You know, video games are expensive, so it's a kind of commercial form of creativity, a commercial form of art. So you need to remember that you are spending huge amounts of other people's money. You have to try to get it back. But at the same time, I said to myself: "Well, if we... To get them back, you need to try to do something great." So both pressures [from players and the publisher] point in the same direction.
Houser also recalled Hot Coffee in the process of answering — in 2005, modders found hidden intimate content in GTA San Andreas, which led to a series of scandals. The game received an "adults only" rating, it was removed from store shelves, and there were lawsuits.
The developers feared that after the Hot Coffee story, they might be shut down:
I think GTA 4 was created under a lot of pressure, because then the company was under all this pressure — [Rockstar] was on the verge of collapse several times because of Hot Coffee. It was incredibly difficult. So, I think it was a very stressful period. With GTA 3, the company was practically "ruined". But I was young, and I didn't care. I wasn't living in the adult world yet. There was pressure during the development of each game. The more I felt that I was immersed in the creative process and tried to be more ambitious, the more pressure I felt [on myself...]