GTA 5 News

With Grand Theft Auto 6 set to launch on PS5 on November 19, Sony Interactive Entertainment is preparing to remove its predecessor from PlayStation Plus two days earlier. Grand Theft Auto 5 will leave the Extra and Premium catalogs on November 17, 2026.

Built largely with code generated by Claude, the Android port of Grand Theft Auto IV is still experimental, and its creator says it may be unstable. A separate project packages Grand Theft Auto V for iPhone, while a browser demo revisits the original game's vehicle physics.

The archive of Rockstar source code contains fourteen service levels — test ranges where the studio checked what the GTA 5 engine could actually do. VGTimes went through the main one piece by piece: it is not a warehouse of spare parts but a laid-out ground, and there are 297 placed objects on it. They show what was tried in the game and what never ended up in it.

Paralympics Productions is shutting down its native Android port of Grand Theft Auto V after Take-Two Interactive took legal action against the project. Project lead M0jso said the team will officially close on October 3, 2026, ending development shortly before the port was expected to be released.

Plenty has been written about the early map from the Rockstar archive over the past week: it was put together in 2014–2015, and its ground looks like screenshots from a mapping service — Tech4Gamers wrote about it, and TheGamer reported the same. There is almost no vegetation on the map either — that much is visible in the textures we pulled out. VGTimes pulled those textures out and looked at them close up. It turns out the point is not the resemblance: the maps' own menu is still in the ground.

Vapor published a benchmark showing the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V running through emulation on an iPhone 18 Pro Max with Apple's A20 Pro chip, matching a GeForce GTX 1650's frame rate at similar settings. The phone averaged 66 FPS during a drive through the city and 80 FPS in other scenes, while a separate estimate put the chip's performance per watt about 1,180% ahead of the graphics card.

The cut GTA 5 heist known as The Sharmoota Job has been public knowledge since 2015: GTA Wiki has a page on it with three approaches and the available crew, and audio from a tour of the mansion has been on YouTube for over a decade. Its targets are just as well known — the safe, the prize horse and the kidnapping of the lady of the house. What we did not find explained in the breakdowns we checked was why the heist needed a horse at all. The answer turned up in a recorded but never released scene, which VGTimes transcribed in the archive of Rockstar source code.

Minecraft has long had no rivals in sales, and its lead over the closest competitors keeps growing.

SharpEmu's compatibility list now singles out several PS5 releases as its most advanced titles, with Dreaming Sarah, Terrarium, New Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja, Tetris Forever, Hoa and Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered now tagged for 60 FPS play.

The compatibility update notes that "playable" does not mean a game has been tested from beginning to end. Games with that rating currently run without major problems, but some may still have minor graphical or audio issues. Dreaming Sarah was among the first to receive the status, while Tetris Forever holds a stable 60 FPS after optimizations from one of the developers.

The most devoted GTA fans have dreamed for years of a collector's edition with the heroes, a steelbook and a disc. Rockstar offered them a shot glass, a razor blade keychain and a figure of a TV alligator.

Going through the Rockstar leak, VGTimes read the export of GTA V's internal bug tracker: 55,543 entries from April 2010 to July 2012. We were not the first to look at the export itself. A PS3 devkit with a build of the game was posted in April 2024, and notes on bugs from its files were being discussed no later than April 2025, when RockstarINTEL summarized them in a piece on a cut mission. By our check, nobody had collected the funny entries separately. The standout: the app with Chop crashes when the dog relieves himself. This is a mobile app: for the game's launch, Rockstar released iFruit, where you could look after Franklin's dog from a smartphone. Also in the selection: a chicken that vanishes when hit by a tank cannon, and a tester's question: "Is the clown van going to have a funny horn?"

On September 18, GTA modder TJGM reconstructed the overall layout of Liberty City from sound zones found in a leak, which, according to him, was being built for GTA 5. VGTimes dug through the same data in more detail: the zones turn out to have names, letting us pin down roughly where Star Junction, Middle Park and Hove Beach sat, find two zones flagged as "construction," and see how the developers named the shorelines surrounding the city.

Athletes are already bracing for November — but not for the playoffs. Coaches and scouts, according to the player, will have it even worse.

Rockstar updated its modding guidelines to spell out what players can and cannot do with Grand Theft Auto 6 content, especially around commercial use and online play. The game is set to release on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, while the PC version has not been officially announced.

The horses cut from GTA 5 left behind far more traces than earlier reports revealed. VGTimes examined the files in the retail version and found data for the horse's physics model, reins, six sound banks, and a route file near a ranch. These remnants do not mean horse riding still works in the game, but they show how much work had gone into the feature during development.

A Reddit user named wax469 says his GeForce RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X began failing after an unofficial DLSS 5 mod was added to GTA V, though the exact cause is still unconfirmed. The heavily modified GTA V Legacy had reportedly been running normally for weeks before the mod was installed.

A massive 192 GB archive of Rockstar Games' internal data has begun circulating widely online. It contains numerous traces of canceled content for Grand Theft Auto 5, including major story expansions, as well as some early assets from GTA 6.

Los Santos was never the calmest place to begin with, but now players are being watched at practically every intersection. And the mod's creator didn't build this for realism — his goal was the exact opposite.

Xbox's new Disc to Digital compatibility hub is now the main place to track what has been fixed and added, and the latest update brings several more Rockstar games into the lineup. On September 10, Xbox Disc to Digital was updated, bringing the service's catalog to almost 1,500 supported games.

Matt Freedman, a former Rockstar Games programmer, said GTA Online was treated as "an afterthought" during development, with the team expecting it to fail. He said confidence was low because the mode launched with very little content.

Freedman said testers initially found only about four hours of content in GTA Online, which reinforced the skepticism. GTA Online itself released in 2013, two weeks after GTA V.

PC owners have historically drawn the short straw with Rockstar. This time, it looks like the wait could be noticeably shorter — and not because the studio's grown any kinder.

Digital Foundry has published a technical analysis of Grand Theft Auto VI's gameplay demo, saying the biggest visual gains show up in its character work, hair, and lighting. The outlet also noted that the PS5 version already shows a few compromises, especially in reflections.

Speaking in a recent interview, Michał Nowakowski, joint CEO of CD Projekt RED, said the studio's push to ship Cyberpunk 2077 in late 2020 came from internal and external pressure, not from investors.

Nowakowski said the situation was more complicated than a simple push from the outside. In his words, the team was exhausted and wanted to get the game out the door, while fans and other voices were also asking for a launch. He added that the release period was unusual because it happened in the middle of COVID-19.

Rockstar Games has confirmed that NoPixel V, the official GTA V roleplay server, will move into closed beta testing on September 8, 2026. The project is being developed by NoPixel with Rockstar's support, and the beta will be limited to invited participants on PC through the Rockstar Games Launcher.

Microsoft has started testing Xbox Disc to Digital with Xbox Insiders on August 31, 2026, giving a first look at how the conversion flow works on supported consoles. The program lets compatible Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S discs be converted into digital licenses tied to the user's account.

Grand Theft Auto VI's NPC systems are at least 10 years ahead of the industry, according to Berkay Dursun, an AI programmer at IO Interactive. He said that after footage from the game appeared online, making it clear he was reacting to what Rockstar Games has shown rather than to any internal access.

Rockstar North co-head Rob Nelson says GTA 6 will let players use suppressive fire to intimidate enemies and, in some situations, get through encounters without killing anyone. The game is still set for November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Nelson described suppressive fire as intentionally missing and shooting near a target to intimidate or disorient it. He also gave a heist example: players may be able to enter a store without triggering the alarm and leave before anyone is alerted.

Rockstar Games unveiled Grand Theft Auto 6, and in the first gameplay trailer fans immediately spotted several familiar details: Valentina from Grand Theft Auto Online, and the project's page on the PS Store, where the release is still set for November 19, 2026.

Twitch suffered a major outage soon after the premiere of the Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look, with Twitch Status showing widespread problems across the service. The timing was notable because the gameplay presentation could be co-streamed by content creators, and the extended gameplay was drawing heavy attention as it went live.

Rockstar has already opened pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI, but Jason Schreier says the publisher is still treating it as a single-player release for now. In a YouTube video published on August 7, 2026, Schreier described a conversation with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.

Rockstar is using Grand Theft Auto Online's summer heist event to hand players a $1,000,000 login bonus. The promotion runs from August 6 to August 12 and is part of a summer heist event in the game.

Australian players can no longer use the Diamond Casino's gambling features in GTA Online, after Rockstar Games restricted access under new classification rules. The change, which reports say began on July 28, 2026, still leaves non-gambling rewards in place even though the chips themselves cannot be exchanged for real money.

Mosjo, the enthusiast behind an unofficial Nintendo Switch port of GTA 5, has revealed that the project has now made it past the prologue and no longer gets stuck at the main menu. Even more impressively, the game is running on a modded Nintendo Switch OLED rather than through emulation, making the current state of the port far more promising than many expected.

Former Rockstar Games employee Rob Carr, who worked at the studio from 2007 to 2016 and contributed to GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption, has criticized the way the modern gaming industry operates. According to Carr, the developers behind some of the industry’s biggest hits often receive no share of the profits, even after spending years working under intense crunch conditions.

Kodansha Game Creators Lab's Sweet Hamster Days launched on July 17 for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and creator Katayama says Grand Theft Auto V helped inspire its odd premise through its three-protagonist switching. The live-action romance sim takes that mechanic in a very different direction.