// WIRED US/UK — MONDO
Gaming Can’t Afford More Games the Size of ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’
Grand Theft Auto VI finally arrives in November. A staggering 13 years and two console generations after the release of its predecessor, the long-awaited sequel has effectively become one of gaming’s holy grails—a title that some thought they’d never actually see, its development cycle so legendarily long that there’s a dedicated “we got [x] before GTA 6” meme.
The latest criminal opus lets players control Jason and Lucia, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, and bears all the hallmarks of Rockstar's incredible attention to detail. Leonida, the open-world setting based on Florida, looks almost impossibly vast yet meticulously detailed, with its own weather systems and hundreds of animal species roaming around.
It’s shaping up to be a game of unprecedented scale and ambition—and exactly the sort of experience the wider industry can’t afford to keep chasing.
At launch, it doesn’t matter how good or bad Grand Theft Auto VI actually is. On sheer hype alone, it’s already guaranteed to be the biggest and most successful entertainment product of the year, maybe the decade. Some estimates already put revenue between $1 billion and $4 billion on preorders alone, with eager players clearly not put off by its $80 price (or $100 for the Ultimate Edition).
Although Rockstar hasn’t confirmed the development budget, that would be a healthy return even on the wildest (and debunked) guess of $2 billion, before factoring long-tail sales or the revenue drawn by the ongoing Grand Theft Auto Online. With numbers like those, it’s easy to understand why every publisher and developer wants their own GTA VI–level game.
Yet even if Grand Theft Auto VI is an outlier, the arms race among AAA-tier developers to constantly deliver bigger, more detailed, more ambitious games is a dangerous direction, hurting both game quality and the people who make them.
The games industry is in a paradoxical crisis. It’s the most successful entertainment medium on Earth—generating $200 billion in revenue in 2025, dwarfing the global film industry’s $32.8 billion and even beating the combined sports sector's $174 billion—but the last few years have seen seemingly endless developer layoffs, many at headline AAA studios. Worse, many of these redundancies are coming after successful game launches.
Take 2025’s Battlefield 6 as an example. Despite being the top-selling game of the year, shifting 7 million copies in three days after a reported development budget of $400 million, publisher EA fired workers across at least four studios involved in the game's creation. A spokesperson told IGN that the job losses were made to “better align our teams around what matters most to our community” (the CEO got a nice $8 million bonus, though).
It’s far from the only case—Halo: Campaign Evolved developers Halo Studios faced 268 job losses in September 2026, following Xbox announcing 3,200 cuts in July 2026 as part of a wider “reset” across Xbox, while Ubisoft is hitting at least three of its German studios with a round of “voluntary” layoffs, including its Düsseldorf branch that has worked on the likes of Rainbow Six: Siege, which boasts “more than 100 million registered players.” Smaller studios aren't immune—Refactor Games, behind Netflix’s FIFA World Cup game, lost 85 percent of its staff after a “successful” launch.
With developers facing unemployment threats even after delivering a financially successful game, unionization efforts are unsurprising, though that's seeing pushback. Rockstar is currently embroiled in a UK tribunal hearing over the alleged dismissal of 34 workers in Edinburgh for union activity. (Rockstar says the workers were dismissed for “sharing confidential company information.”)