Rockstar issues GTA 7 Update and it's Good News

GTA VI is coming next year and then God knows what Rockstar Games will be working on next. If it’s GTA VII though the studio has already provided a promising update on it.

GTA VII feels like an inevitability as the Grand Theft Auto series is as popular as ever and we all know GTA VI is going to break many records and make a lot of money.

Chances are when work on GTA VI ends Rockstar Games will move onto something new, maybe something related to Red Dead Redemption or probably a brand-new IP.

When it does come time for the developers to give us another Grand Theft Auto game though it’s not going to be cheating with AI, at least according to Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.

Take-Two Interactive is Rockstar’s and oversees much of the studio’s game distribution and marketing, with Zelnick providing a few updates here and there on the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game.

Zelnick recently spoke to CNBC about AI as a tool for speeding up game development, and seemingly questioned its place in the game industry’s future.

GTA 6

“Let’s say there’s no constraints,” began Zelnick. “Could we push a button tomorrow and say ‘create an equivalent of Grand Theft Auto and the marketing plan’ and here it is? The answer is no.”

The CEO basically went on to say AI can only go so far when it comes to the creative process, saying 'you wouldn’t end up with anything good, you’d get something derivative'.

Zelnick then praised the team at Rockstar, saying “The team’s creativity is extraordinary, and what Rockstar Games tries to do, and so far has done over and over again, is create something that approaches perfection.”

The overlying point Zelnick made was game development requires creativity and while AI can be a tool in creating games it can’t do so by itself.

Feeding data to an AI and telling it to make a game would just create a product similarly to the data you’ve fed to it, not something new and worth selling.

Grand Theft Auto 6

What Zelnick isn’t saying here is that Rockstar Games won’t use AI as a development tool, just that it won’t rely on AI to make its upcoming games, whether it be GTA VII, Red Dead Redemption 3 or whatever else is up the studio’s sleeve.

It’s a promising update, but we’re nowhere near that point yet as GTA VI has taken years to develop.

We probably won’t get another Grand Theft Auto game until the late 2030s, if that.