Grand Theft Auto VI is still several months away, but in November 2026, the highly anticipated game will only be available to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S owners. PC users, as with previous Rockstar Games projects, will have to wait. Former GTA V producer John Riccio, who worked at Rockstar from 2003 to 2014, explained why the studio adheres to this strategy.
In an interview with Kiwi Talks, Riccio stated that the reason is not only related to commercial considerations but also to the technical aspects of development. According to him, consoles allow developers to use resources as efficiently as possible because their hardware configuration is known in advance.
They have an ecosystem with precisely known hardware characteristics. They know the technical capabilities and temperature limits of each console, so they can fully focus on optimization without thinking that someone might have a ten-year-old graphics card.
Riccio also emphasized that creating a game first for fixed hardware is significantly easier than trying to adapt it to a huge variety of PC configurations. According to him, reducing system requirements takes much more effort than subsequently improving graphics.
Cutting down game features is much harder than expanding them. To achieve high performance, you have to manually rework many elements: reduce draw distance, simplify models, and write additional code that disables unnecessary objects earlier. This is a lot of manual work.
As an example, Riccio recalled the story of the first Red Dead Redemption, which reached PC only 14 years after its initial release. According to him, an early PC version existed during development and even ran within the studio, but it was too unstable for release.
However, the decision to abandon further work on the port was dictated not by a negative attitude towards the platform, but by resource allocation. As the former Rockstar employee noted, the management preferred to direct engineers to create Grand Theft Auto V, as it was a more profitable investment of time and effort.
According to Riccio, such decisions are always made taking into account development priorities: if the choice is between several months of work by dozens of engineers on a PC port and improving the next major project, the studio invariably opts for the development of the main game. This is why the delay of PC versions of Rockstar projects is more often associated with technical and production reasons than with a desire to deliberately postpone the release for computer users.