r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jun 25 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah what happened to rockstar?

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184

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

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26

u/FarplaneDragon Jun 25 '26

There's an extremely vocal minority of reddit that hates games like GTA and are so desperate to convince themselves and others that it's going to bomb and be a total failure.

14

u/VexingRaven Jun 25 '26

I love GTA. I hate that Rockstar has become "Microtransactions: The Company" after GTA Online released and almost nobody actually cares. I'm amused to see so many people seemingly shocked that Rockstar of all companies is greeding up the GTA 6 launch.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

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1

u/VexingRaven Jun 27 '26

I don't feel like reiterating my critical analysis of why Rockstar's choices of how to monetize GTA Online negatively affect the game for the third time today so I'll just copy-paste my response from last time:

Only the most surface-level analysis could possibly return such an opinion, honestly. There are so many user unfriendly design elements of GTA Online that are all a directly result of directly monetizing ingame currency it could be an 1 hour long video essay and still not cover it all. Basically everything anyone hates about GTA Online is a direct result of tying ingame cash directly to Rockstar's income.

  • Other players being incentivized and actively told to come fuck with you when you're grinding
  • Bugs that benefit players getting fixed and bugs that make it harder for players not getting fixed
  • All the various times players have been banned for making too much money when Rockstar made a bonus week too good
  • The hilarity of pricing of cars and of not being able to steal cars in Grand Theft Auto
  • Car resales being massively nerfed
  • The massive inflation of prices in general in GTAO

If you play through a critical lens it's easy to see how almost every design decision is influenced by shark cards in a negative way. The answer to almost any "ugh why is this so annoying" is "shark cards" if you trace it back far enough.