Rockstar Doubled in Size for GTA 6, Hired Fashion and Racing Pros

Rockstar Games has grown to approximately 4,000 employees to develop Grand Theft Auto 6, more than doubling the roughly 2,000-person headcount the studio carried at the time of Red Dead Redemption 2’s release in 2018, according to a new cover story published by Dazed magazine and reported by IGN.

A Studio Built Around One Game

Rockstar’s expansion over the past several years has come through organic hiring and a series of studio acquisitions in Australia, India, and Los Angeles. That LA office stands out in particular: as GamesRadar notes, it is almost entirely dedicated to developing the game’s NPCs, signaling how much focus Rockstar has placed on making Vice City feel populated by believable people rather than background props.

Fashion, Vehicles, and Street Art Get the Expert Treatment

What separates this expansion from a standard hiring surge is the type of talent Rockstar pursued. The studio brought on Miami-based stylist Jillian Carr in 2023 to build what the company calls a “fashion ecosystem” for the game. Carr’s job is to capture the range of style, class, and cultural identity that shapes how people dress across Vice City’s social landscape. “Vice City is built around vanity,” Carr told Dazed. “Between social media, celebrity culture and a constant flow of tourists, appearances carry significant weight, and trend cycles turn over quickly.”

Carr is not a one-off consultant. She and others from outside traditional game development are full-time Rockstar employees who have been embedded in the studio for years. Alongside her work, Rockstar hired racecar drivers to refine vehicle handling and brought on 50 real street artists to create murals scattered across the game’s map, according to IGN.

Gameplay Details and What Comes Next

The Dazed feature also surfaced new gameplay specifics beyond the staffing news. PC Gamer reports that protagonist swapping between Jason and Lucia is built around flexibility, with players able to run missions as a couple or split off and operate independently. Eating, working out, and sleeping have all been confirmed to affect your characters in meaningful ways as well.

Rockstar has signaled that this wave of information is only the beginning of a larger promotional push for GTA 6, with an extended gameplay reveal planned through Netflix expected to show the game in much greater depth.

Sources: IGN, GamesRadar, PC Gamer