Rockstar Is Making the Wrong Game With GTA 6

Wow, that GTA 6 trailer looked amazing, right? WRONG. BAD BOY! I caught you with your hand in the cookie jar, but instead of cookies it’s just miniature copies of GTA 6 from the press kit for ants. Okay, fine, maybe you’re right, that trailer was good, but that doesn’t mean Rockstar isn’t making the wrong game. Are you confused yet? Because I am. Anyway, grab a drink of your choosing while I explain to you why Rockstar developing GTA 6 is the least exciting thing they could do right now. 

For years we’ve speculated about when we might be playing GTA 6. Rockstar has released, re-released, remastered, and remade GTA 5 every which way possible to cash in on that sweet moolah in the 12 years since the game first released on PS3 and Xbox 360, so of course we’ve all been itching to get our dirty little hands on a new GTA game. But it wasn’t until February 2022 that the video game giant finally confirmed that they were indeed working on GTA 6. Thanks to all of the flashy trailers, we now know most of the gory details, too: we’re heading back to Vice City and its surrounding area, our protagonists are a Bonny and Clyde-style criminal duo, and that the game has been delayed until may 2026.

But what if I said to you that while the game does look good, and I’ll eat my proverbial hat if it isn’t because Rockstar has never made a bad game, there are far more interesting projects that the company could be working on right now. Before we dive into what those are, we first need to look at the context of what we’re talking about here. See, in the 13 years since 2012, they have only made GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. Every other project has been some kind of weird half-baked re-release like the GTA Definitive Edition, which was far from definitive am I right? Or something like Bully Anniversary, which was only on mobile for some reason? So, while GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are both amazing games, that’s still an awfully long time to go without any other kinds of games, especially when the previous titles were mainly GTA and Red Dead as well. Who do they think they are, Kojima Productions?

It’s time, my friends, to rewind back to the glorious year of 2012. While that year saw the Mayan calendar disproved and unfortunately for us all the world kept spinning, we also got Max Payne 3 but made by Rockstar instead of Remedy. While people’s opinions differ on this game, it was a nice conclusion to the Max Payne Saga, and it marks the end of the era where Rockstar actually put effort into trying out new and forward-thinking ideas that were outside of the traditional crime games that had made them famous. 

The year before, in 2011, they released LA Noire, a game about being a detective in the golden age of Hollywood. It spawned many memes, but the interrogation system actually asked you to solve real crimes. And rather than just having you fail the mission if you locked up the wrong person, LA Noire actually made you live with your decision if you didn’t do your due diligence and just locked up that old grandma who was giving you the stink eye. 

In 2010, believe it or not, Rockstar released the original Red Dead Redemption game. While we’re used to the idea of John Marston, Arthur Morgan and Dutch’s Western adventures now, the very idea that you could roam the wild west and hogtie poor women of the night and lay them on train tracks was mind-blowing. What….? Don’t tell me you didn’t do that you deg—. 2008 and 2009 saw the gaming giant release GTA 4, which followed Niko Bellic’s adventures in bowling with just a tad of crime on the side, as well as the excellent Ballad of Gay Tony and Lost and the Damned DLCs, which followed other elements of the criminal underworld. 

Are you starting to see the pattern here? In 2012 and before, we saw pretty much 1 game per year from Rockstar, and they were more varied experiences that weren’t just repeats of the biggest franchises. Since 2012, we’ve basically had 2 games, and both were sequels of games that came out in 2008 and 2010 respectively. But let’s go a bit further back in time to the juicy stuff; the games that Rockstar made that were not only wildly out of left field but also controversial. 

In the six years between 2001 and 2007 is when Rockstar arguably had their best run of video game creation in their entire history. In those short years they managed to develop or publish: GTA 3, Max Payne, State of Emergency, GTA Vice City, Max Payne 2, Manhunt, GTA San Andreas, The Warriors, GTA Liberty City Stories, Bully, and Manhunt 2 – and I’m even missing out a bunch of smaller games like Midnight Club because otherwise this list would go on forever. All of those varied, interesting, and frankly excellent games all happened in the span of 6 years, but compare that today and you’ll realise that Rockstar hasn’t even released a new game in the last 6 years. It does make you wonder how much of their current strategy relies on edging us until we’re at prime gooning levels. Hmm [stare into space]

Looking at these earlier years highlights one thing that’s missing from Rockstar’s recent development history: variety. Manhunt was an edgy game similar to the running man, where players had to survive a deadly series of events while being filmed. The Warriors took the 1970s film about street gangs in New York and turned it into a fun action game that puts other licensed IPs to shame. Bully follows a juvenile delinquent student called Jimmy, who is involuntarily enrolled at Bullworth Academy boarding school for a year, forcing him to contend with the eponymous bullies and all the trouble that goes with school life.

Not only was Rockstar prior to 2012 putting out new IPs in different genres, all of these games we just talked about were not just good, they were great. Bully, for instance, enjoys cult status even today, and you don’t have to go far to find someone or other who will vouch for every single game Rockstar has ever made, because they have a distinguished track record of never making a bad game. Sure, some games might not meet individual subjective tastes, but it’s hard to find other studios who have made so many hits over two and half decades. 

So, why oh why did a video game company as prestigious as Rockstar Games stop trying new ideas after 2012? Why have we seen a huge focus shift to GTA and Red Dead Redemption in this time? You’re probably screaming the word money at your screen right now, and you’d be absolutely correct, because that’s the conclusion I also came to also. But here’s where the story takes a weird turn.

When looking into how much money all of these other franchises made, it might appear that they didn’t perform as well as GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, which made $8 billion and $700 million respectively. The Warriors on PS2, for example, gained the company $37 million dollars in revenue, while Bully has also made roughly the same amount if we extrapolate from Steam across all consoles and versions. What we have to take into consideration, however, is that many of these games came out when video games weren’t as mainstream, and these numbers haven’t been adjusted for inflation. They also cost significantly less to make. Looking at this handy graph, we can see that GTA 4, for example, cost $100 million to make, but fast forward to GTA 6 and Rockstar’s development costs have purportedly run up to an eye-watering $2 billion.  

What’s also strange is that we’ve seen the buying, selling, and swallowing up of different Rockstar studios. The team at Rockstar Vancouver was shut down, the team at Rockstar New England who was developing a Bully sequel suddenly had their development tasks changed to help create Max Payne 3 instead, leaving Bully 2 unfinished. In all of these cases and more, it’s unclear why a company that has had such success needs to mess with its studios and change their strategy so much. 

And that brings me to the general thesis of this article, which is that Rockstar is making the wrong game. Sure, GTA 6 will be a big hit and we all want to play it, but what about all of the other IPs and franchises that Rockstar has just lying dormant? They made such a racket about LA Noire’s crazy realistic facial expressions at the time, so can you imagine how good they would be with the ultra-realistic graphics shown in GTA 6’s trailer? What about if they made Bully 2 with modern mechanics and story twists? What if Manhunt 3 was all about taking vengeance on billionaires? I bet that would go down just right with the current zeitgeist. 

And rather than making us all wait pretty much a decade between Read Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6, wouldn’t it be nice to play some other Rockstar games a bit sooner, even if that DID come at the cost of the insanely high quality of polish they are currently layering their games with? I don’t want this to come across as old man yells at clouds , but as we’ve seen, Rockstar was at one point capable of slapping out hit after hit up until 2012, when they seemed to move to a new strategy that focused on putting all of their eggs in one basket with one title at a time. And while that might be making them a boatload of cash, it’s just not as fun for the people who play games, who have to wait with excitement for so long. 

So yes, while I will be playing GTA 6 when it eventually comes out, I still think Rockstar is making the wrong game. They have a giant pool of games to pick from that aren’t GTA or Red Dead Redemption, and it would be great if they splashed their cash and let some of their smaller studios take a chance on a project that brings something new to the table, even if that’s just so I’m not cashing in my pension by the time GTA 7 comes out.