Obbe Vermeij, a former technical director at Rockstar North, predicts that someone will spend tens of thousands of dollars to get GTA 6 running on PC before Rockstar releases its own version. He bases that on his years at the studio. He has no inside knowledge of what Rockstar is planning now.
He gives two reasons. Generative AI has made it much easier to port games and improve emulators, and a game as big as GTA 6 gives people a strong reason to attempt it.
“It will take a long time. It actually, physically takes hours and hours and hours to do these things. And it will take a bunch of tokens and everything, so it would probably cost like, tens of thousands of dollars in tokens. But like, you know, if it’s GTA, I think people are gonna try it,” Vermeij said in a recent interview.
A reason for Rockstar to speed up
Rockstar’s past releases suggest how this will go. GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 both came to PC a while after they launched on console. GTA 6 is expected to follow suit, arriving first on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a PC version later.
Vermeij thinks AI tools could let outsiders shrink that gap. As he sees it, a fan-made port could hurt Rockstar even if it ran poorly. It would only have to exist.
“It really has changed the world,” Vermeij said, “and I think I would be concerned, if I was Rockstar, that somebody would just take the PS5 version and get AI to change it to PC, which won’t be won’t be as good as their effort, but it could still also hurt their sales. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an effort to get [the releases] a little bit closer together. Obviously, I don’t really know what they’re thinking.”
The final sentence of that quote is worth noting. Vermeij is a former developer guessing at the pressure Rockstar and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, might face. Neither company has announced any change to the PC release timing, and Vermeij says he doesn’t know their plans.
The cost is what makes it plausible
Vermeij doesn’t claim it would be easy. GTA 6 is a hugely complicated game, and he said an AI-built port would take a lot of hours and a lot of money. Even so, he thinks today’s tools are probably capable of doing it.
Whoever managed it would get to play GTA 6 on PC before any official release, with PC-only features the consoles lack, such as NVIDIA DLSS 5.
Some would do it to spite Sony
Spite could be part of the motive. Over the past few months Sony has made several unpopular decisions, among them a plan to stop producing discs in 2028. Those moves have sped up work on the KyTyPS5 emulator and on unofficial ports of games that are still PlayStation exclusives, such as FromSoftware’s Bloodborne.
People clearly want to do it. Getting the game files in the first place is the hard part.
A PC version on day one is unlikely
PlayStation is running a firmware fight with jailbreakers to stop GTA 6 from being dumped at launch. If nobody can dump the game, nobody can port it. That makes it unlikely GTA 6 will run on PC in any form on release day, unlike The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which can be played that way today.
At launch, GTA 6 will be playable on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. If Vermeij’s prediction holds, the first unofficial PC build will come from someone willing to pay a five-figure bill for AI tokens.