Grand Theft Auto VI launches on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox, according to Gamebonk's release tracker, and a former Rockstar North technical director believes the threat of AI-generated knockoff ports could bring its PC version forward. Obbe Vermeij made the case in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, while stressing he has no knowledge of Rockstar's actual plans.
Vermeij's worry is that someone will feed the console build into generative AI tools and churn out an unofficial PC port. "I would be concerned, if I was Rockstar, that somebody would just take the PS5 version and get AI to change it to PC," he said, adding that such a port would fall short of Rockstar's own work "but it could still also hurt their sales." His conclusion: "I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get [the releases] a little bit closer together."
He thinks current tools are "probably" up to the job, though not cheaply. He estimated a port would take many hours of processing and cost "tens of thousands of dollars in tokens." Rock Paper Shotgun notes that the latest rumours put GTA 6 on PC somewhere in early 2027. Eurogamer points out that the game itself will ship without generative AI or microtransactions.
Why GTA has always gone console first
Vermeij, who Kotaku says served as technical director on Grand Theft Auto III, explained the series' long habit of launching on PC later. The original GTA was built on PC, with an outside company in Dundee handling the PlayStation version, which cut the game's textures from 256 colours down to 16 and left the art team furious. By GTA 3, Rockstar had flipped the order and built for console first.
Most publishers prefer a single simultaneous launch because it means paying for one marketing campaign, Vermeij said, but GTA is big enough to follow its own schedule, and shipping one version at a time is easier for developers.
He acknowledged that a company like Take-Two can send in lawyers, but said the old protection of sheer development effort is gone. "What was the case before, is that there's so much effort in developing the game, that it is not possible to rip it off, and that's completely changed now," he said.
Vermeij left Rockstar in 2009 and now works as an indie developer. His current early access game, Plentiful, is a hexagonal god sim focused on water physics, and according to Rock Paper Shotgun it uses AI-assisted machine translation for localization but not for gameplay, art, or audio.
“But like, you know, if it's GTA, I think people are gonna try it.”Obbe Vermeij
