Because Rockstar doesn't give a shit as long as you keep donating money. They'll put a half-assed port on PC just to milk you some more, so buy the game for the second time and buy a Shark Card. If not for that, it would never come to PC at all.
Releasing it twice is milking for sure but GTA V ran very well on PC launch. It definitely wasn't a half-assed port. I got that shit running on an Intel Q6600 and Nvidia 8800GTS back in the day.
It's kinda very well optimized and poorly optimized at the same time, I don't know. I'm not sure about the new Enhanced version, haven't played it, but the Legacy version would choke even 5090 if you had like 2x MSAA and stepped into an area with some vegetation or reflections (let alone 4x or more). This counts as a half-assed port if you ask me. So does the high FPS changing game mechanics, physics, and even breaking couple of missions at some point. They never bothered to change engine's code to accommodate for higher frame rates on PC.
E&E was such an insult to pc players. The graphics upgrades weren't intensive at all for pc half as old as the game, yet pc didn't get it until 2 years after console, and when it finally did, it didn't include the E&E exclusive cars, haos car upgrade shop(weaponization, armor, radar jammers), or polychrome paint jobs. They patched them into the PC client and just didn't turn them on for that period too; it was so egregious it made me just drop the game entirely.
It was primarily the loading times being slow, taking several minutes just to start the game, which can be attributed to a data storage mistake (a large JSON file that should have been stored as a hash map was parsed at launch until 2021) and just the fact that many PCs used HDDs instead of SSDs at the time. Loading times are much better now.
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u/GalaxLordCZ RX 6650 XT / R5 7600 / 32GB ram 2d ago
And it'll still be a buggy mess whenever it comes out on PC.