Former Rockstar developer Mike York explained why "GTA6" did not launch on the PC platform when it first launched, but launched on the console platform first. Mike York spent six years at Rockstar, working on Morals 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 before leaving the company in 2017.
"The reason the PC port came out later, rather than first, is because they wanted to prioritize sales," York said. "Most of the time, especially in the past, the PlayStation was the best-selling console, the console that everyone had. In most cases, it sold more than any other console. Everybody was playing the PlayStation."
York said that for "Morality and Law 5", Rockstar is giving priority to PS3 and making an Xbox360 port version at the same time, and then making a PC version after release. Morals 5 was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013, PS4 and Xbox One in November 2014, and was not released on PC until April 2015. PS5 and XSX|S versions will also be released in March 2022.
York went on to get to the point: For a game as complex and huge as GTA, to create a PC version for a large number of potential hardware configurations, a lot of testing must be done to ensure the quality of the game at launch. York said that this is the main reason why Rockstar Games released the PC version of the game after the console version, and why "GTA6" will follow this model.
"Everyone should remember this: One of the main reasons a PC port takes so long is because its architecture and components are different."
"They have to adapt to all the different scenarios that could happen. Because on PlayStation and Xbox, every console has the same graphics card, the graphics card is the same, the architecture in the box is the same as the PlayStation that sells to millions of people. But when it comes to PC, Everyone's PC is different. They run differently, have different CPUs and GPUs, and the memory usage and the different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes glitch and mess up, but that's what it boils down to."
"They have to test the game a lot more on PC than they do on Xbox or PlayStation. If you think about it, you're already testing the game a lot to get it to work, so it's harder on PC. You have to put more resources into it, you have to do more testing. When you're doing a PC port, you have to do it on multiple Test on different hardware, different GPUs. Not one or two, but 10 or 20. There are so many different configurations that you can't possibly test them all, because once you release a PC port, it's not tested by millions of people, so you can only go so far."