Former Rockstar Games tech director thinks GTA 6 could be coming to PC sooner than you'd expect to curb AI clones

Former Rockstar Games tech director thinks GTA 6 could be coming to PC sooner than you'd expect to curb AI clones

Copycat fight.

Former Rockstar Games North technical director Obbe Vermeij believes that the possibility of AI vibe coded ports of Grand Theft Auto 6 could push Rockstar to create an official PC version sooner than you'd expect.

Speaking to RockPaperShotgun as part of a wider interview, Vermeij said generative AI "really has changed the world.". He elaborated: "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 as good as [the developer's] 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."

Vermeij emphasised that he doesn't know what Rockstar's plans are, but with his technical expertise, he does believe that generative AI tools are "probably" capable of pulling off a GTA 6 PC port.

"It will take a long time. It actually, physically takes hours and hours and hours to do these things," Vermeij said. "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.".

We've already seen people thrust footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 into AI software over the past few months. AI slop videos have been pulling in millions of views on social media, and people have been 'improving' trailer footage with Nvidia's DLSS5 'yassification' machine (thanks Ars Technica). Grand Theft Auto 6 itself will not feature any generative AI or microtransactions at launch.

AI game clones continue to be a problem. Game developers have cancelled public demos in fear of having their game copied, and Steam owner Valve has gone out to say it's the developer's responsibility to prevent cloning by making their games more original. Even as Anthropic has introduced measures to prevent such practices, other AI software can still perform such tasks.

PS5, Xbox Series X/S