Bloomberg reports the next GTA stars a criminal duo with the series' first female lead, in a fictional Miami

Bloomberg reported on July 27, 2022 that the next Grand Theft Auto would follow two playable criminals, one of them the first woman to lead the series, in a present-day version of Miami. The report relied on people inside or close to Rockstar. Rockstar declined to comment, Kotaku noted, and at the time none of it was official.

This post describes the report as it stood in July 2022. The update at the top explains what Rockstar has confirmed since.

What Bloomberg said about the game

Bloomberg's original article is paywalled, so the details here come from the summaries published the same day by Game Informer, Kotaku and VGC.

• The leads. Two bank robbers in a story that borrows from Bonnie and Clyde. The woman was described as Latina; her partner is a man.
• The setting. A fictional modern Miami and the areas around it, which Game Informer read as a return to Vice City.
• A smaller map than first planned. Early designs, under the codename Project Americas, stretched across large parts of North and South America. Rockstar cut that back to the Miami area. Work on the game in some form was said to date back to 2014.
• Lots of interiors. The single city was said to have more buildings to enter than any earlier GTA.
• Growth after launch. Rockstar planned to keep adding missions, and possibly new cities, after release. VGC said studio leaders hoped this approach would ease crunch at the end of development.
• Timing. Game Informer and Kotaku said the report pointed to a release before March 2024, though some developers doubted that would hold. VGC's summary put the game at least two years away.

What it meant for players

For fans, this was the most detailed picture of the game so far, and it came from reporting rather than an insider post. It pointed to a familiar city and a lead who, per the report, would be the first woman to front the series. It also suggested that the single-player world would not be fixed at launch.

On timing, it offered little to plan around: a target that some of the developers themselves doubted they would meet.

The changes inside Rockstar

Much of the report was about the studio rather than the game. According to Bloomberg, development had gone more slowly partly because Rockstar wanted saner schedules after criticism of working conditions during Red Dead Redemption 2. Among the changes it described:

• contractors made full-time employees, and more producers hired to manage the workload, though some staff told Bloomberg the extra producers "caused bottlenecks" (VGC)
• new mental health and leave benefits, and a system that let staff take back the extra hours they worked
• several senior figures that employees saw as abusive pushed out early in the pandemic
• a more careful approach to humor, with developers avoiding jokes that "punch down" at marginalized groups, as VGC put it

Bloomberg also reported that a police-themed GTA Online mode, Cops 'n' Crooks, was shelved after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

What has been confirmed since

Rockstar revealed Grand Theft Auto VI with its first trailer on December 4, 2023. Take-Two's press release placed the game in the state of Leonida, home to Vice City, and VGC noted that the trailer showed a fictional Miami and a pair of leads, one of them a woman, a first for the series. Rockstar's page for the trailer now names the two leads, Jason and Lucia, whose story turns when "an easy score goes wrong."

So the core of Bloomberg's story held: a pair of leads, one of them a woman, in a Miami-inspired city. Lucia's background as Bloomberg described it, the Project Americas map history, new cities after launch and the internal changes at Rockstar have not been confirmed by Rockstar and remain reported. The press release gave a 2025 window, past the March 2024 target described in the report. The current release details are in our launch FAQ, and the full sequence of events is on the timeline.