Late yesterday, Eirik reported on the news that SAG-AFTRA will be striking once again, this time specifically in the video game sector in an effort to combat the way that artificial intelligence (and a few other things) are used in the industry.
As games tend to take a much longer time to make than movies are TV shows, we were under the assumption that if this does become a lengthy strike it will not have an impact on the games world until perhaps a couple of years down the line when we start seeing games that are in the voice and capture part of the development process at the moment. This of course led many to wonder about Grand Theft Auto VI.
In a statement provided to Kotaku, it has been confirmed by Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, that GTA VI is exempt from the strikes and won’t be affected.
A Take-Two spokesperson says, “I can confirm that GTA VI is exempt.”
This isn’t necessarily because any work with SAG-AFTRA personnel is complete on the project already, as it is also confirmed that in the SAG-AFTRA database GTA VI is still listed as a game that people can work on, as it’s mentioned that “any game already in development before September 2023 is also exempt.”
This seems to suggest that even many games we’ll see in 2025 and 2026, and perhaps even 2027 and beyond (meaning The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2.0 could still be safe too as they have been in development in some capacity at CD Projekt Red for a while now) will not be affected by these strikes, suggesting that the impact could be seen even further down the line.