GTA 6 console-only launch isn’t anti-PC but a case of resource management, ex-Rockstar producer says

A former Rockstar producer says the decision not to release Grand Theft Auto 6 on PC isn’t because the company “doesn’t like PC”, but a matter of resource management.

In an interview with the Kiwi Talkz podcast, John Ricchio – who was a producer on Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5 – was asked about whether making GTA 5 for Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware led to Rockstar being limited in what it could do with the game.

Ricchio replied that Rockstar’s policy is to concentrate on the console versions first, because then the hardware’s limitations are known to the developers, and then worry about making a PC version later – as opposed to making the PC version first then trying to figure out how to get it working on potentially less powerful hardware.

“Most of the time you take what you’ve got,” Ricchio explained, “and that’s a lot of times why people love developing initially on PC, and then porting over: ‘Before ship, we’ll get everything onto console’.

“I think that’s less fashionable now, but there was a time where that was kind of a thing, where ‘we’ll make it run on PC and then we’ll go to these other platforms’, and it just causes so much problems down at the end. So you’re much better off starting with the constraints.

“Sometimes every once in a while, there’ll be advanced features that you can take advantage of later, that you can decide to plan for or not. But yeah, it’s always better to start with the constraints and then extend, because shrinking is a lot harder than extending.

“It’s way harder to make your game performant than it is to to just be like: ‘Oh, we’ve got extra room, cool, we can de-optimize some things or make them more shiny.'”

Prioritising GTA 5 over Red Dead PC

Ricchio also acknowledged the PC port of Red Dead Redemption, which didn’t arrive until 2024, some 14 years after its original release on consoles.

According to the former producer, Rockstar did start work on a PC port at the same time as the console versions but decided it wasn’t worth committing resources to optimising it when those resources could have gone to working on Grand Theft Auto 5 instead.

“We actually got a PC build [of Red Dead Redemption] running very early, just to see how how far would it take, and most of the time it’s just… it’s not even that we don’t care about PC. It was just like, ‘is it worth spending time getting a PC port going versus working on GTA 5’, you know what I mean?

“It’s always those conversations. It’s never any specific, you know, anti- any platform. It’s just is it worth spending the time and effort to get something running on Switch, or something like that, or Wii, who knows. And I think you have to make those calls per game, and in a lot of cases there are legitimate hardware limitations, right?

“But as as time has gone on, I feel like the the consoles are definitely closer, so it doesn’t quite feel as bad, but it just becomes about ‘if you’re working on that, you’re not working on something else’, usually. And so if you’re spending money on that, you’re not spending money on something else.

“And so that’s where the the business case has to be there. There has to be enough of a business reason to to do some of those ports, or the lift has to be so light that it’s like ‘oh, it’ll be super easy to do’. And it’s rarely super light, there’s always something that you’ve got to do.”