Ex Rockstar dev says GTA 6 would be worth the "$80 bucks or whatever" for its detail and realism: "You think Mario Kart competes with a game like this"

In the wake of Tuesday's surprise GTA 6 trailer 2, a former Rockstar developer says the level of detail and realism on display warrants whatever price tag Rockstar wants to hit us with.

In case you've done your mental health the bountiful blessing of staying offline this week, GTA 6 is the talk of the town. Everyone from other game developers to the creator of GTA himself is talking about the new trailer, and now Mike York, who was an animator at Rockstar from 2012 to 2017, is chiming in.

It'd be one thing if it was a current GTA 6 dev saying this, but York presumably has no skin in the game at this point, and he's still mighty impressed, saying in a lengthy reaction video that he sees a noticeable improvement in the game's lighting from the first trailer to this new one.

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"Sometimes during production you figure out something that changes everything, and in here it could be lighting," York says (via VG247). "They're like, 'Oh no', they figured out how to solve this new thing to make the lighting look much better, and then they just crank that up to 10, 11.

"They start really focusing on changing a lot of stuff and redoing all the lights, because they found this new kind of method maybe to do the lighting – the reflections and all the different stuff for the ray tracing."

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Rockstar has yet to unveil the price for GTA 6, which is now scheduled to launch on May 26, 2026, but with Nintendo floating $80 games like Mario Kart World, wallets the world round are shaking in their leather-bound folds. Regardless, York says no matter how much GTA 6 ends up costing, it'll be well worth the investment.

"All these other games that come out for 70 bucks, 90 bucks, I mean look you've got Mario Kart for $90 – you think Mario Kart competes with a game like this, as far as how much stuff they've got to put into a game?"

At various points in the video, York can be seen oohing and ahhing at GTA 6's admittedly next-level visual detail, and, in particular, guesses "they've done something to the lighting" in the time between the two trailers' releases.

As other folks have said, GTA 6 trailer 2 really does look like something that traveled back in time from the future, although the footage is 99% cinematic, so there's still no telling what gameplay in the final product will look like.

EA CEO won't call out the GTA 6 delay by name, but says the new Battlefield release window is "clearer than it was before."