GTA Online 2 is going to be so big it will break the games industry – Reader’s Feature

14 Dec

GTA Online 2 is going to be so big it will break the games industry – Reader’s Feature

GTA 6 key art — Is there room for anything else? (Rockstar Games)

A reader worries what effect GTA Online 2 is going to have on rival game companies, as it distracts players from other games for potentially months and years.

As I write this the second trailer for GTA 6 still hasn’t been released and I will be very surprised if it is at The Game Awards. I don’t say this as a random guess but because I believe I understand why Rockstar Games is so slow to release Trailer 2 and why they so rarely release any new information of any kind. It seems to me a simple reason: because none of it matters. GTA 6 is already destined to be the biggest video game of all time, so what’s the rush?

I’m sure GTA 6 will be great, like all Rockstar games usually are, as despite all the money they make I don’t think there’s anyone that doubts they put a lot of effort into their games. They make so few of them they kind of have to or they won’t have another chance to prove themselves for another decade!

But even if it did somehow turn out terrible, I’m not sure even that would matter at this point. GTA 6 is already too big to fail and if that’s big I don’t even know how to describe GTA Online 2. People talk about the success of GTA 5 but it’s really GTA Online that’s kept the game afloat all this time and this week we got confirmation that GTA 6 would have the same sort of mode as well.

What we also heard this week is evidence of what we can all already see; that publishers are terrified of announcing a release date for anything anywhere near autumn next year, in case they end up coming out at the same time as GTA 6. Watch them all try and launch at the same time as Borderlands 4 or Mafia: The Old Country, because they know that Take-Two know when GTA 6 is out, so they’ll assume the release dates of those two games will be safe.

Everyone else though, who knows what they’ll do? I’m sure they don’t. And that goes for Nintendo, with the Switch 2, on downwards. But that’s only the start of it. Assume everything comes out in a fairly orderly manner and games sell relatively normally, without GTA 6 eating their lunch. Now try to imagine what things are going to be like two or three months afterwards, when GTA Online 2 has got its teeth into people.

People aren’t going to play anything else ever again. Thinks that’s hyperbole? GTA 5 is over a decade old and it’s still regularly within the top 10, often the top five, games being sold and played on any given format. GTA 6 probably would’ve been out a lot sooner if that wasn’t the case, but Rockstar didn’t want to disrupt it. There was absolutely no need to make a sequel because it was almost impossible for GTA Online to make any more money than it already was.

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People will slowly drift away from GTA Online 2, of course, but very slowly in some cases. How many kids do you know that don’t play anything other than Minecraft or Roblox? Or adults that only play Call Of Duty or EA Sports FC? GTA Online 2 is going to be like that but magnified by 10. No other game is going to get a look in unless it’s the second coming of Zelda or maybe some little indie game you can play in between other things.

I really do think this is going to be a genuine problem. GTA Online 2 is literally going to be too successful, at least from everyone’s point of view except Rockstar’s. Even then, they’ll probably be at a loss as to what to do about Red Redemption 3, because they’d be competing with themselves I they released it.

It’s a credit to the game’s appeal – and I agree it’s strange that no other company is even trying to copy it nowadays – but GTA 6 is going to be the games industry for most of new year and probably several years after that.

By reader Lenge

GTA Online screenshot — The first GTA Online is still huge (Rockstar Games)

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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