So. On November 19, humanity releases the most expensive media project it has ever attempted.

GTA 6 has been in the making for over a decade and roughly cost $2b; that’s Burj Khalifa construction money.

And it is peak human art.

If it bothers you that the most anticipated cultural product in the history of our species is about killing, stealing, drugs and assorted vices...

I have some news about the human condition you are not going to enjoy.

Aristotle argued that we go to tragedy precisely to feel pity and terror and purge them.

Augustine of Hippo, the greatest psychologist of the ancient world and arguably the founder of Western Christian thought, stole pears as a boy not because he wanted pears but, as he admits in the Confessions, because the theft itself was delicious.

My wife listens to true-crime podcasts, and apparently the more murders, the better.

So, sixty million pre-ordering customers are not a moral crisis. It's just how we are, on some level.

And of course, these days nothing major can go ahead without becoming part of the culture war.

The 27-minute video and the reactions, per Bloomberg's reporting: every camp is already fighting about what the game says about society before anyone has played it. Good stuff… new norm.

Now, I digress. On the business side. Not much. Nobody needs to worry about the ROI. The previous game, released thirteen years ago, still sells five million copies every three months. Whatever GTA 6 costs, it is a safer investment than all the bond Treasuries, crypto, gold, Pateks and rare-edition Porsche 993s combined.

What we are interested in here at Meme Guide to Management is the organisation that made it, and what it cost them. There will be thousands of hours of podcasts about this launch and a shelf of HBR-style case studies within two years.

Here is the early version, for free because we love you here in Meme Guide.

Some history. The games industry ran for decades on a simple production technology: young people who loved games too much to quit worked until they broke.

Rockstar was part of the machine. 100-hour work weeks, a toxic environment, revolving doors, all the good stuff that today, in our hyper-achieving, distracted world, is being sold as a necessity of corporate culture.

And Rockstar was proud of it. In October 2018, weeks before Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar's co-founder Dan Houser told an interviewer that the team had been working 100-hour weeks. Remind you of your office, investment bank, consultancy... that one delusional partner?

The quote was technically about four senior writers over three weeks. It did not matter. Journalist Jason Schreier interviewed dozens of Rockstar staff and found that behind the exaggerated number stood a true culture: pervasive overtime, fear, bullying, what employees themselves called a frat-boy operation.

However, thankfully for us, games enjoyers, that changed. The company decided that enough is enough, and that in order to be the best of the best, they shouldn't count their performance in hours overworked.

Between 2018 and 2022, per Schreier's reporting at Bloomberg: salaried overtime pay introduced. Schedules made flexible. Long-term contractors converted into actual employees. Managers described as abusive were fired, not promoted.

One employee's summary: "a boys' club transformed into a real company." By 2022, staff was telling reporters morale was the highest it had ever been.

Now. Short term, the reform had a price.

Development became slower than even longtime employees expected. The humane pace is a named reason this game took a decade. When the first delay came in May 2025, none of the employees Schreier spoke with had believed the official release date anyway.

Leadership chose the delay specifically to avoid what he called brutal crunch.

The CEO, Strauss Zelnick, defended it with a sentence worth framing:

Is the story clean?

No. In 2024 the company mandated five days in the office, citing security after years of leaks, and the workforce hated it.

In late 2025 it fired 30-plus employees it says leaked confidential information and a union says were organising; the dispute is in legal proceedings and I will not adjudicate it.

In the final stretch right now, reports describe a team exhausted and leaked-on anyway. A decade of focus, for God's sake.

So, just like in the famous quote from the movie Cars: in order to move quicker, you have to go slower.

Mind blown.

In 2014, a team of researchers ran the Game Outcomes Project: 273 game developers, 120 questions, correlated against actual results, review scores, ROI, delays.

Their conclusion, verbatim:

Amy Edmondson at Harvard named this effect in 1999: psychological safety.

What it does is deliver performance most strongly in exactly the kind of work GTA 6 represents: complex, creative, interdependent.

Google's study of its own 180 teams found psychological safety the single biggest factor in effectiveness, ahead of even the skills of your individual talent.

Meanwhile, Harvard's "Toxic Workers" study quantified the other side: avoiding one toxic hire is worth roughly twice what hiring a top-one-percent superstar adds.

And yet the toxic workers in the data were more productive than average.

That is why companies keep them. Ignoring the fact that overall outcomes are in decline.

The masterpiece of drug consumption and genocide-level murder of law enforcement was produced, for a decade, on sometimes-reasonable hours, converted contracts, fired bullies, and delays that everyone said were fine because they saved the team.

Our patron saint, Peter Drucker, wrote it down seventy years ago, as usual: "If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great."

The game about vice required a company with virtues. Hehe.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek