In January, my furnace died, and when the furnace dude arrived, he took one look at our gaming setup and launched into how excited he was about Grand Theft Auto 6. This game is penetrating normal-human space in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and I’m a thousand years old.
But our conversation did turn to the online component of the GTA franchise, GTA Online – i.e., the reason we cover the game here on MOP. I didn’t have an answer for him on the fate of that game, other than it makes a ton of money and I couldn’t really see Rockstar gladly throwing it away. It didn’t even kill Red Dead Online when it didn’t maintain numbers. Maintenance mode, sure, but not death.
But apparently, Rockstar doesn’t have a clear plan on that front. We’ve been assuming GTA 6 will come with its own version of GTA Online because, again, money. But if so, what happens to the classic GTAO that people have been playing and building up into MMOs in their own right for years?
“I’m going to speak theoretically only because I’m not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn’t been made,” Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick told IGN last week. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles. As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I’m not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017. If I’m not mistaken. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they’re alive and we have this massive audience. So we’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”
That sure does seem to imply GTAO is safe, though we won’t believe it until we’ve seen a giant text memo from the team screenshotted and slapped on Twitter, which as we all know is Rockstar’s only communication format.
