Monday Musing: The GTA Eclipse
Monday Musing: The GTA Eclipse
Time to bring back Monday Musing.
The most obvious thing to talk about is what happened back in September. The gaming release schedule was absolutely packed. Loads of games decided to come out all at once, mainly due to the fact that Grand Theft Auto 6 releases on November 19th. We saw a massive bunch of games crammed into September and October, but in November. Everyone is giving GTA, an 18+ game, a totally free ride toward the holiday season.
A bunch of games got delayed into next year just to avoid it, while others pushed to go early. GTA itself was delayed at one point, and that caused the rest of the industry to completely rethink when to release. We even have quite a few games launching in 2027 now just to stay out of its way.
I’m sort of looking forward to GTA. It’s set in Vice City, which is basically Florida, right? Rockstar normally gives you a great single-player experience, and I have zero desire to play the online mode. That said, I am a bit worried about the pricing for the base game.
It’s going to be a single-player game, but with a massive online side too. I fully expect the wider industry to still misunderstand that single-player games are heavily in demand, even though we have a few good ones coming out. This release comes after a string of high-profile failures that were strictly live-service and online-only. We don’t actually know much about the online side of things yet, or even the single-player story. Compared to other franchises, GTA takes an age to come out; Rockstar really takes their sweet time. We’ve had GTA 5 for what feels like forever now. 5 came out one generation of consoles ago and got a new version for the current crop of consoles. With the current generation already starting to wind down, I’m expecting something similar this time around.
It’s also a massive cultural icon. Everybody, or at least most people, knows the references. Though, I’m still annoyed they did that crappy remastered trilogy of the older games and made it harder to access the original versions, which were far better. On the bright side, a union formed at the studio. Given the current state of the gaming industry, a successful GTA 6 launch should raise some hopes.
The industry is in a massive state of flux right now with sky-high costs, intense competition, and a total player base that seems permanently stuck around 250 million. Only once has that not been the case: the Nintendo Wii broke past that hard cap, expanding what video games could be and making it easy for anyone to get into them. Giving someone a modern controller if they’ve never touched one before is incredibly awkward.
The British studio behind the game is a massive success story that few people actually talk about here. It brings in far more money than other traditional industries people normally focus on, yet it’s easy to miss or ignore. Often, we focus too much on past cultural successes instead of trying to ensure something new gets built. In that respect, GTA 6 is quite impressive. The game takes its time because the studio knows exactly what it wants, building itself for the cultural moment. It has a massive impact, yet nobody really talks about the scale of it until it actually happens. It’s a rare thing to see something that so many different types of people will enjoy, especially given how fragmented pop culture and the gaming landscape are these days. There are very few true crossover games anymore.
The fact that every other publisher is actively avoiding it shows you just how tight people’s wallets are right now, and how much trouble the industry is actually in. Companies are trying to chase impossible numbers with massive budgets and bloated scopes. The bet here from Rockstar is that GTA 6 is a money-printing machine that will work for years until the next game.
I just hope it’s a good game. And that it runs well, given how long it’s been in the making.
That’s all for Monday.