One number from inside Rockstar Games explains the scale of Grand Theft Auto VI better than any trailer. The art production team that numbered just five or six developers on Grand Theft Auto V has grown to 65 people for GTA 6 — a roughly tenfold increase for the group responsible for getting the game's enormous volume of art made, delivered and used effectively.
Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier revealed the figure while discussing his visit to Rockstar North in Edinburgh, where the studio opened up about the making of GTA 6 for the first time. Schreier spent a day with publishing head Jennifer Kolbe and the game's three heads of development — Rob Nelson, Aaron Garbut and Phil Hooker — and the art team detail underlines just how much bigger this production is than its predecessor.
Art is one of the biggest drivers of modern game budgets, because bigger and more detailed worlds demand far more assets, and every asset needs a production line behind it to make sure it actually ends up in the game and gets used well. A dedicated art production team exists to run that pipeline, and Rockstar growing it from a handful of people to 65 suggests the volume of art built for GTA 6 has grown by at least the same multiple.
That points to a Leonida that is not just larger than GTA 5's Los Santos, but denser and less reliant on reused assets. It also fits the wider picture from Schreier's reporting: Rockstar as a whole has grown from 2,441 employees when Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018 to 4,711 staff across 12 offices, including a Los Angeles studio built solely to create the NPCs who populate the world.
Built Without the Old Crunch Culture, Rockstar Says
The expansion comes with a stated change in how Rockstar works. Kolbe has said of finishing the game, "We're not going to finish this game by crunching," even as the studio acknowledges it could not avoid extra hours entirely across more than eight years of development. The game's map was once planned to span parts of North and South America under the codename Project Americas before Rockstar narrowed the focus to Leonida and its version of Vice City — and even that "smaller" version needed the biggest team in the studio's history.
Grand Theft Auto VI launches November 19, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, when players will finally see what a 65-person art production pipeline actually looks like in motion.
