Former Googler says GTA 7 will be built inside a real-world twin

Making an open-world game today is a brutal exercise in digital bricklaying.

Studios spend the better part of a decade hiring armies of 3D artists just to handcraft every curb, streetlight, and skyscraper. But according to one former Google insider, that era is about to end.

Speaking on The Next Wave podcast hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lands, Bilawal Sidhu claimed the installment after GTA 6 will be built directly inside a virtual twin of the real world, rather than manually rendered by artists.

The last handmade sandbox

Sidhu knows a thing or two about digital environments. He previously managed 3D product experiences across Google Maps and AR/VR teams, and now hosts the TED AI Show.

During the conversation, Sidhu stated flatly that GTA 6 might be the final title in the franchise where humans manually emulate physical reality.

He noted that reality capture techniques have already proved their worth in franchises like Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefront to capture lifelike textures and assets.

However, the rapid progress in AI and spatial computing means future developers won't just capture individual props. They will likely ingest entire living environments as a continuous digital twin.

And gaming is just the beachhead. Sidhu pointed out that cloning the physical world carries massive utility beyond entertainment, from civil engineering to disaster preparedness, allowing planners to run simulations in risk-free digital sandboxes.

Add in recent breakthroughs like Google DeepMind's SIMA agent—which can navigate complex game worlds using plain language instructions—and the foundation for fully autonomous, ultra-realistic digital worlds is starting to come together.

Why it matters

We think Sidhu's prediction points directly at an unsustainable bottleneck in the gaming industry: runaway development cycles.

Flagship games now take close to a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to build. If studios can replace brute-force asset creation with AI-assisted reality capture, production timelines could shrink dramatically.

For gamers, you shouldn't hold your breath just yet. GTA 6 is still the immediate prize, and GTA 7 is easily a decade or more away. But down the road, this shift could mean future sandbox maps look uncannily identical to your actual neighborhood.

For the broader tech space, this signals that geographic mapping data and game engine pipelines are converging into a single pipeline. Tech giants sitting on massive 3D mapping datasets suddenly look like critical infrastructure providers for game studios.

That said, there is a clear catch. A perfect 1:1 replica of reality doesn't automatically make for a fun playground. The magic of franchises like Grand Theft Auto has always lived in Rockstar's satire, stylized geometry, and deliberate level design. If a digital twin is too sterile, all that photorealism won't save it from being boring.