Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar Games is staffing up its creator platform division with an eye toward UGC creators

The new creator platform roles, which oversee both current Rockstar creator products such as the FiveM UGC platform and new products for “emerging trends in UGC, gaming [and] technology,” could impact development of the much-anticipated “GTA 6” by helping formalize the series’ massive creator ecosystem ahead of its launch in May 2026. 

“Everyone is super curious about what they’ve been building for so many years,” said Marcus Holmström, CEO of the UGC development studio The Gang. “But the fact that they are going out and actively looking for these kinds of people shows that they’re really thinking about the importance of creators in this space.”

Rockstar Games has never released any public figures regarding the overall size of its creator business, but the primary revenue stream of creators’ “GTA” servers on platforms such as FiveM is in-game purchases and other microtransactions, a revenue source that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Rockstar since the release of “GTA 5” in 2015. FiveM servers currently bring in roughly 200,000 active players on any given day, according to the multiplayer online game statistics website MMO Stats, with peaks of around 250,000. 

Brands and marketers are increasingly interested in showing up inside virtual worlds such as “Grand Theft Auto.” Between 2023 and 2024, the number of brand activations on metaverse platforms increased by 30 percent, according to data platform GEEIQ’s 2025 State of Brands in Gaming report. At the moment, the majority of these activations take place inside Fortnite and Roblox. But “Grand Theft Auto’s” incorporation of UGC creation tools threatens to break this metaversal duopoly, creating another prominent virtual sandbox in which brands can build virtual worlds or integrate themselves into creators’ experiences. After all, “Grand Theft Auto” is one of the most popular video game series of all time, and its core audience is largely adults, rather than children or teenagers.

“I certainly think the difference between ‘GTA 6’ and Roblox would be pretty significant, the difference being that level of realism and violence, and presumably getting to a more aged-up, 20-plus, 30-plus audience that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to reach as effectively on Roblox,” said Stephen Dypiangco, a Roblox brand consultant and writer of the Roblox industry newsletter Max Power Gaming.

The descriptions of Rockstar’s new creator roles, which are future-facing and and require the staffers to both “grow existing businesses and explore opportunities for future products,” are notably more expansive than the description of Rockstar’s previous most recently listed creator platform job, a community manager role specifically geared toward FiveM listed in September 2024. This reflects that the responsibilities of Rockstar’s creator platform team have expanded from maintaining “GTA 5’s” pre-existing creator economy — which evolved organically as the result of Rockstar’s 2023 acquisition of FiveM — to building a creator economy that will be baked into “GTA 6” from the moment it publishes.

“I think it’s really good that more players are coming into the UGC space, and especially Rockstar with ‘GTA,’ since there has been an organic mod community on top of ‘GTA’ as well,” Holmström said. “So it’s already been part of it — but now, if they can actually include it in the main product, I think it could disrupt the entire UGC space.”

One of the listed responsibilities for the new product manager role is to build out creator monetization tools, a point that Holmström said that he found encouraging due to the fact that monetization continues to be a source of growing pains for both UGC creators and production companies across all platforms. 

“That’s also where I think they can come in and compete,” Holmström said.

UGC creator Austin “Tom Jank” Rodriguez, who primarily develops Fortnite maps, told Digiday that he was “definitely” interested in exploring the UGC opportunity in “GTA 6.” 

“It is a very unique UGC platform that has a lot of potential, especially with the massive hype behind the core game,” he said. 

However, Rodriguez was wary of the job listing’s lofty language, pointing out the unique nature of UGC compared to other forms of creator content. He said he would be more confident if Rockstar hired talent from pre-existing UGC platforms such as Fortnite or Minecraft to build out its creator platforms division.

“At the end of the day, I care more about who they hire and what is the final product they deliver,” he said. “UGC is a unique style of game development that can be tough to adjust to.”