Grand Theft Auto V came out on September 17, 2013. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on November 19, 2026. Just over thirteen years sit between them, long enough that someone who bought GTA V for a PlayStation 3 at launch will be playing its sequel on hardware that did not exist at the time.

It is easy to assume that a thirteen-year gap means GTA 6 took thirteen years to make. It didn’t. The years between GTA V and GTA 6 include much more than the development of one game.

Thirteen years and what came before it

Rockstar released seven mainline Grand Theft Auto games between November 1997 and September 2013. Since GTA V, there hasn’t been another.

Earlier releases came much closer together:

  • Grand Theft Auto: November 1997
  • GTA 2: October 1999
  • GTA III: October 2001
  • Vice City: October 2002
  • San Andreas: October 2004
  • GTA IV: April 2008
  • GTA V: September 2013

That five-year gap between GTA IV and GTA V was the longest in the series’ history, and it held the record for a little over a decade.

The wait for GTA 6 is more than twice as long, putting it well outside anything the series had seen before.

What those numbers do not tell you is where the time went.

The first five years belonged to another game

Rockstar’s next major release after GTA V would not be another Grand Theft Auto. It was Red Dead Redemption 2, which arrived in October 2018 after roughly eight years in development. Preliminary work on RDR2 had started as early as 2010, around the time the original Red Dead Redemption was released.

By the time RDR2 was finished, around 1,600 developers had worked on the game. Its production brought Rockstar’s worldwide studios together as a single team, in a way its earlier games had not.

That scale puts the first half of the thirteen-year wait in a different light. Rockstar remained active during those years, bringing GTA V to new platforms and releasing other projects. But its largest and newest undertaking was Red Dead Redemption 2.

When Rockstar started counting

Rockstar has never said exactly when work on GTA 6 began. Its parent company, Take-Two, has offered a more useful marker. In May 2025, chief executive Strauss Zelnick said that Grand Theft Auto VI “began development in earnest in 2020,” following Red Dead Redemption 2.

That puts about six and a half years between 2020 and GTA 6’s November 2026 release. It is a long development, but far shorter than the thirteen years separating GTA V from its sequel.

Zelnick did not define what “in earnest” meant, so we don’t know how much work may have taken place before 2020. What it does give us is a much later starting point than the release dates alone would suggest.

Even that timeline became longer than Rockstar intended. The game was delayed twice, first in May 2025 and again that November, with Rockstar saying the additional time was needed to finish it to the standard players expect. Speaking on the Founders podcast in May 2026, Zelnick put the delay at “about 18 months behind the original date.”

That original date was never thirteen years out.

The wait that never went quiet

While players waited for another mainline Grand Theft Auto, GTA V continued across new platforms and generations.

GTA V began on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2013. It moved to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the following year, reached Windows in 2015, and arrived on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2022. Rockstar carried the same game across three console generations, the last of which did not exist when GTA V was made.

Its age did little to slow its sales. Take-Two reported that GTA V had sold-in more than 215 million units by May 2025, rising to more than 230 million by August 2026. Those are shipment figures rather than player counts, but the scale is striking for a game that was already more than a decade old.

Grand Theft Auto Online extended that life even further. Launched two weeks after GTA V in October 2013, it continued receiving new content throughout the wait. In July 2026, just four months before GTA 6’s release date, it received a new heist.

Other franchises have had similarly long waits between major releases. Half-Life went more than twelve years between Episode Two and Alyx, while Metroid Prime went eighteen years between Corruption and Beyond. But for much of those stretches, there was little new activity from either series. GTA’s long wait looked very different.

Closing

Rockstar has never given a single explanation for the time between GTA V and GTA 6.

The wait was thirteen years. The development was not.