Rockstar Games plans to release the PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI within the first three months of 2027.
Grand Theft Auto VI’s November 19 console release across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S is one of the game industry’s most highly anticipated launches of all time, sparking industry-wide speculation about the game’s yet-to-be-announced PC release date. GamesBeat has confirmed that Rockstar plans to release the PC version of GTA VI in the first quarter of 2027, according to four industry sources familiar with the studio’s plans, all of whom requested anonymity to avoid damaging business relationships. A Rockstar Games representative did not respond to a request for comment prior to the publication of this article.
The Q1 2027 PC release window for GTA VI comes only a few months after the game’s November 2026 console launch, representing a significantly quicker turnaround for PC development than the previous iteration of Grand Theft Auto, whose April 2015 PC release came roughly a year and seven months after the September 2013 release of Grand Theft Auto V.
The user base of Grand Theft Auto V skews largely towards console players, with PC players representing a small minority. With GTA VI’s production budget rumored to exceed $2 billion, Rockstar is highly incentivized to pull all the levers it can as fast as it can to monetize the game’s upcoming sequel — and PC players represent a significant expansion of the GTA VI audience.
The potential benefits of launching GTA VI relatively quickly on PC go beyond the opportunity to grow the game’s casual player base. Rockstar has signaled its plans to implement user-generated content creation tools into GTA VI, and the company’s August 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, the development team behind the prominent Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying server company FiveM, made it clear that Rockstar considers online roleplaying in GTA to be a factor in the game’s future. FiveM is a modification framework for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V, meaning 100 percent of GTA roleplaying activity across the company’s servers takes place on PC.
It might not take long for online play to come to Grand Theft Auto VI following the game’s release on November 19. In an interview with Bloomberg at Tokyo Game Show, Twitch chief executive officer Dan Clancy said GTA VI online will launch “next year.” If role-playing servers and other forms of user-generated content will be an important facet of the GTA VI user experience, the game’s PC release is a necessary precursor for this kind of activity. Thus far, Rockstar Games hasn’t announced an official launch date for online play in GTA VI.
Rockstar has made it clear that it is more than willing to push out production timelines to fine-tune GTA VI. So far, the studio has delayed the game’s official release twice. Rockstar initially announced a release window of 2025 for GTA VI in December 2023, with further announcements pushing that delay to May 2026 and then the current November 19 date. During earnings calls this year, Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive has reaffirmed GTA VI’s November 19 console release date, indicating that the game is in its final polishing and debugging phase. Although the PC release of GTA VI is slated for Q1 2027, it will have to pass the same quality bar as the console version of the game before Rockstar pushes it live.