Ask a casual fan who is making GTA 6 and the answer is usually "Rockstar," full stop. That is technically correct and hides almost everything interesting. Rockstar Games is not one building in one city: it is a network of studios spread across Scotland, England, the United States, Canada and India, all credited collectively and all feeding one game. With the development team roughly doubled since Red Dead Redemption 2, according to design director Rob Nelson, it is worth mapping where all those people actually sit.
Rockstar North: the historical heart
Every mainline GTA since the original has flowed through the Edinburgh studio now called Rockstar North. It began life as DMA Design, founded in Dundee in the late 1980s, created the original Grand Theft Auto in 1997, and took the Rockstar North name in 2002, the year Vice City shipped. Scotland is where the series' DNA lives, which gives the current UK employment tribunal involving former Rockstar staff an extra layer of significance: the dispute sits in the same country as the franchise's engine room.
New York: the publisher and the brand
Rockstar's headquarters in New York City handles publishing, marketing and creative direction at the company level. When you see a Newswire post, a trailer drop strategy, or the Netflix partnership behind August's Extended Look, you are looking at decisions routed through New York. The city is also where parent company Take-Two Interactive is based.
San Diego: where the engine comes from
Rockstar San Diego, formerly Angel Studios, is the birthplace of RAGE, the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine that powers GTA 6. The studio built the Red Dead series' foundations and its Midnight Club racing lineage still echoes in how Rockstar handles vehicles. Our RAGE engine explainer covers why that technology matters for everything from ray tracing to physics.
The wider constellation
Around those three anchors sits a web of specialist studios. Rockstar Toronto has supported the company's biggest releases for decades. Rockstar Leeds built the PSP-era games, including Vice City Stories, and now supports mainline development. Rockstar Lincoln handles quality assurance and localisation, the unglamorous work that decides whether 60 languages of subtitles actually fit on screen. Rockstar London and Rockstar Dundee, the latter formed from Ruffian Games in 2020, add further UK capacity. Rockstar New England, once Mad Doc Software, contributes engineering muscle from Massachusetts. Rockstar India in Bangalore has grown into a major production force for art and technology. And since 2023 the Cfx.re team behind FiveM has been inside the tent, now surfacing publicly through the Nopixel V collaboration.
The new one: a Los Angeles studio just for NPCs
The most striking recent detail came from Rob Nelson in the press round after the Extended Look: Rockstar established a Los Angeles based studio dedicated solely to NPC interactions. A whole studio for background characters sounds absurd until you remember what Rockstar is promising: hundreds of thousands of NPC animations and a world where, as Nelson put it, teams must become students of human behavior. We covered that reveal in depth in our LA NPC studio report.
One credits list, no silos
Since the GTA 5 era, Rockstar has credited its games to the whole company rather than individual studios, and GTA 6 is being built the same way: one team across many time zones. The scale has consequences. Nelson has admitted he doubts any single developer knows the entire game, a claim we unpacked in nobody knows the whole game. It also means the old question "which studio is making GTA 6" has no clean answer anymore. The honest one is: all of them, simultaneously, for years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Rockstar North leading GTA 6 development?
Rockstar no longer describes its projects as led by a single studio; games are credited to the whole company. Historically Edinburgh has been the center of gravity for mainline GTA, but GTA 6 is officially a company-wide effort.
How many people are working on GTA 6?
Rockstar has not published a headcount. Rob Nelson has said the development team roughly doubled since Red Dead Redemption 2, whose credits already ran to thousands of names across the company.
Did Rockstar really open a studio just for NPCs?
Yes. Nelson told interviewers after the Extended Look that a Los Angeles based US studio was established solely for NPC interactions. It is one of the clearest signals of where the ambition in this game sits.
Does the UK tribunal affect GTA 6 development?
The tribunal over roughly 34 firings runs from September 10 to October 15, 2026. There is no indication it affects the game's November 19 release, which Rockstar and Take-Two have repeatedly reaffirmed.
The Bottom Line
GTA 6 is not being made in a place; it is being made in a network. Edinburgh carries the history, New York the strategy, San Diego the technology, and a dozen more studios from Bangalore to Boston fill in everything between, with a brand-new Los Angeles team obsessing over the people on the sidewalk. The next time a single leaked clip gets attributed to "Rockstar," remember how many hands that word actually contains.