Ex-GTA dev says PC makes scads of cash now so hopefully GTA 6's 'PC version will be closer behind' consoles—that is if 'decision-day' at Rockstar doesn't give us a last-minute delay
Rockstar might have come down like a tonne of bricks on the personal blog of former Rockstar North dev Obbe Vermeij (who worked at the studio from 1995 to 2009), but apparently it can't stop him from tweeting. To mark yesterday's 17th anniversary of GTA 4's release, Vermeij took to X to exposit on his experience working on the game, make some guesses about GTA 6, and explain why Rockstar keeps forgetting PC exists.
First up, if you've ever wondered why GTA 4 ditched so many interesting systems from San Andreas—"Stats (fitness, weight), multiple cities, stealth, underwater swimming, jet packs, tanks, bicycles, monster trucks, car modding, planes"—it was so Rockstar could "focus on making the game truly next-gen" for the Xbox 360 era. "Any time we would spend on those old features we could spend on the rendering engine, optimization, natural motion and making everything better."
Those fancy graphics and the cars that handle like out-of-control cruiseliners don't come out of nowhere, you know. Rockstar had to allocate resources to make it all happen, so bye-bye to buff CJ and monster trucks. I probably would have rather had the latter, but what's past is past. And hey, with its Mansa Musa-like fortune, Vermeij reckons Rockstar won't be making "the same cuts for 6."
Vermeij then starts musing on GTA 6. "[GTA 4's] original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas," he writes. "We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007," pushing it back to April 2008. "Only at that time," just a few months before the initial release, "did it become clear that we were going to miss the deadline.
"I'm guessing decision-day for [GTA] 6 will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2's August earnings report."
Which is certainly foreboding, though Vermeij emphasises that he has "no inside info" and is just reflecting on things through the lens of his own experience. Of course, whether GTA 6 gets delayed or not, we here on god's own platform are gonna have to wait a little longer for the game, just like we did with GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and, uh, even RDR 1.
Someone asked Vermeij about that, and rather than saying what I suspect we all feel in our souls—that Rockstar loves to sell you a game on console then sell it to you again a year or two later on PC—his explanation for Rockstar's PC delays is a little less mercenary. "Initially the consoles were a much bigger market for a game like GTA. They just got into the habit of doing consoles first.
"There used to be way more money in the console versions. Now that that's changed, hopefully the PC version will be closer behind."
Wouldn't that be nice? To be fair, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has been out and about saying PC is a "more important part of what used to be a console business" these days, but with the publisher still refusing to commit to a day-and-date release on our platform? I'm not holding my breath (another thing you couldn't do in GTA 4).
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