GTA Online is Rockstars true cash cow, after everything they did in GTAV i would no be surprised if GTA 6 Online goes off the rails with dumb shit within 2 years. GTA Online is likely the reason we never got GTAV DLC or Undead Nightmare 2 as well.
Counterpoint: everyone I know in real life stopped playing Online after a few years because you couldn't do much of anything without being constantly spammed by homing rockets coming from land, sea, and air.
As much money as they made selling this bullshit, I think they left money on the table by disrupting the balance so quickly and thoroughly. It's entirely possible they try to keep people in the disposable income demographics playing longer this time around.
Id like to think GTA6 Online will be a more grounded experience im not getting my hopes up though. I fully agree that GTA Online was bullshit that shouldn't have lasted and still lasting as long as it did while receiving new content when other dlc and games for that matter could have been made.
No denying that cash dump accumulated a fortune that allowed GTA6 to be as ambitious as it is though
The fact they abandoned red dead 2 for that slop still makes me so mad to this day. If there’s one thing I hate rockstar for it’s that. Why tf would you spend all that time making a game to abandon it for a game that was already out for 5 years. It’s so absurd. Fuck GTAV online. Rdr2 online is just the same regurgitated shit
I agree with you, i understand GTA is the real money maker but integrity should still be relevant.
Never getting Undead Nightmare 2 feels like a crime, not even a next gen update for RDR2
Exactly. And that commercial in the extended look with the animals WAS a location in red dead with next gen graphics. They’re just waving it in our faces just out of reach. I feel robbed cause I played the first ones multiplayer for years and was so excited for the second ones online experience to get hit with that news.
And they never thought about the mistake or felt regret for the fans of red dead. Some people like red dead more and I was one of those people. GTA 6 though, is looking like it’s gonna be the next best thing. I’m excited to see what it has in store I just hope they keep it grounded like everybody is saying. It just sucks to wait all those years I remember watching the rockstar page like crazy when they were about to release the first trailer for RDR2
My understanding of the economics of microtransactions is that it's been long known that having whales is better/more profitable than having a wider playerbase.
Not really, because making it more P2W doesn't push out whales. It actually brings more whales in / encourages them to stay (you don't really need to "widen" the net, to actually get more of them). P2W elements push out casual gamers, but the whales will stay (because they're whales, and P2W is fine for them).
But GTA Online still has a massive playerbase of more casual players who spend a lot of money (smaller transactions, but the number of players adds up). So even though GTA Online may feel unbalanced (I tried once, and did not find it fun), Rockstar has obviously struck a very successful balance with GTA Online as it is now. So ultimately, I wouldn't expect them to take a different approach with GTA 6's online component.
Counterpoint: everyone I know in real life has been playing online for 13 years, just create friends only lobbies and fuck around if it bugs you that much
Well yea that works for some but then there are people with friends that don't play GTA or don't play games at all anymore and would like to have an actual online experience and not just a LAN experience which in most cases would be much less populated as well. Best of both worlds would be great right? you can still play with you're friends and others can play with strangers without being spam killed and shit.
R* left money on the table, GTAO to this day is still riddled with glitches to farm millions even at the end of its life cycle. There's a shit ton of YouTube tutorials that go years back with millions of views documenting it all, and with the awful cash-to-GTA$ conversion, only suckers ever paid real money
There was a leak a while back that mentioned only 4% of the playerbase paid for gta+ or something like that, I wouldn't even be surprised if shark card numbers were same, they'll probably tighten up this time around
100% agree, and on PC we had to deal with hackers in the majority of lobbies spamming explosions and blowing everyone up as well. You'd just hear 100 explosions in 5 seconds from across the map and think 'yep, gotta find a new session'. This would happen 3-5 times every time I played it, it ruined the game.
Happened on console too. You would spawn in your garage with a mailbox for a head or some shit, the streets of Los Santos filled with UFOs, invincible people running around blowing things up, etc etc.
Dan Houser straight up admitted that it was more profitable for Rockstar to spend 4-6 hours with a small team making a car to sell with a Shark-Card than it was for them to spend several months with a dev team to make a serious expansion pack of DLC series.
The reason RDO never expanded was because it wasn't making a billion dollars worth of revenue within 12 months. For Take2/Rockstar, if it doesn't automatically print billions of dollars for the least amount of work possible they won't do it.
They can brag all day long about horse testicles shrinking in the cold but Rockstar gets real quiet when you ask why they bothered to make Mexico/New Austin/Isle of Guam if there was never any intention to have players actually go there for anything.
Right? As someone who doesn’t play GTA online I’m pretty comfortable saying that the revenue it generates is the reason rockstar felt comfortable spending (I’ve heard as high as) 2.8 billion dollars on this game. All said and done I guess Rockstar made 4-5 billion dollars on GTA 5 game sales alone. Thats not enough to justify spending 2.8b on a game. My guess is they’re going to try and go bigger and “better” with the online and shit will most definitely get “out of hand”
Kind of a double edged sword. Without the online cash generator GTA 6 would likely be a much much smaller and less impressive game.
For sure, its definitely a double edged sword, there is no doubt GTA Online's success has played into the cash they were able to put into making GTA6 what it is. Its more so just unfortunate that once a mainline game releases from them they use the online version to carry the studio for a decade with no DLC for mainline games or other franchises of theirs. And on top of that at least mainly with GTAV's onlines case it got completely out of hand with flying cars,motorcycles and all around goofy shit.
I would hope GTA6 is more grounded but i imagine it wont be for long given fans of GTAOnline would probably have similar expectations from the new game.
Launch GTAO, before homing missles on lvl12, when the only planes with weapons were the ones in the airbase and any of the weird stuff was the most fun state IMHO
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u/Slow__Cheeta 1d ago
GTA Online is Rockstars true cash cow, after everything they did in GTAV i would no be surprised if GTA 6 Online goes off the rails with dumb shit within 2 years. GTA Online is likely the reason we never got GTAV DLC or Undead Nightmare 2 as well.