GTA 6 is not even out yet, but former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij is already confident that GTA 7 will not leave North America, and he has named three U.S. cities he believes could be part of it.

GTA 6 has not been released yet, and its launch is currently scheduled for November 19, 2026, after two delays. GTA 5 arrived in September 2013, which means a full 13 years and 2 months will have passed between the two games by the time GTA 6 finally lands. If that rhythm continues, we may not see many more Grand Theft Auto entries in our lifetime, but that still has not stopped players from already asking questions about GTA 7, including where it could be set and when it might appear.

One of the most common questions among longtime fans is whether Rockstar would ever dare to return to Europe, as it did with Grand Theft Auto: London back in 1999. However, the franchise’s DNA remains deeply tied to the United States, and one former Rockstar developer has now pointed to the possible cities where GTA 7 could take place. Obbe Vermeij, who spent 14 years at Rockstar Games and worked on San Andreas, Vice City, and GTA 4, discussed the future of the franchise in an interview with GamesHub.

“It’s not realistic to see a GTA in Europe. I’d love it, and if games still took only a year to make, then sure, you could experiment a little, but that’s not going to happen when there’s a GTA every 12 years.” Vermeij’s reasoning is hard to dismiss, as AAA development is becoming increasingly unsustainable and studios keep gravitating toward safer formulas. Europe would be culturally rich ground for a GTA, and so would Tokyo, which has surfaced in rumors before, but Vermeij believes GTA 7 will still stay in the United States, sometime around 2040.

“They’ll go back to New York. They’ll go back to Los Angeles, or maybe Las Vegas.” In his view, technology changes so much between entries that no one is going to skip GTA 7 just because they already played in the same city in a previous Grand Theft Auto decades earlier. “No one’s going to say they won’t play GTA 6 because they’ve already played Vice City. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s completely different. I’m afraid we’re stuck in this loop of about five American cities. We just have to get used to it.”

At the same time, while other companies keep making a fortune every year by expanding their hit properties beyond video games, Rockstar still refuses to push Red Dead Redemption 2 any further than the medium that made it a success.

Source: ScreenRant