Rockstar's ability to create world-beating titles like GTA 6 stems from a core practice - not succumbing to the 'fire and rehire' cycle that has ravaged publishers like Microsoft and Sony.

That's according to David O'Reilly, a 12-year veteran of Rockstar whose credits as an environment artist cover GTA 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5. He claims that "Rockstar doesn't do the whole thing that the games industry has been madly scrambling to do" over the past few years - namely, laying off vast swathes of staff to cut costs, before scaling back up when production needs require doing so.

"How does Rockstar do it?" he asks. "How are they performing these magical feats of game development? It's pretty simple really: They've not engaged in that fire/rehire cycle." The result, O'Reilly claims, is that "Rockstar has kept nearly all of its institutional knowledge," and that in his time at the studio he worked alongside people who had been at Rockstar North when it was still known as DMA Design, a rebrand that took place in early 2002.

That heritage, he says, "is a big deal in today's gaming industry," and the associated "knowledge bank" that comes with keeping your long-serving staff around is invaluable. It's also something that "Sony, Microsoft, all these big publishers [...] don't understand, because they're focused on the money. They don't give a crap about making games. Make no mistake - they do not care about making game products."

That apathy is something O'Reilly believes even Take-Two, Rockstar's long-standing publisher, shares.

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