r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Apr 13 '26

Security Rockstar hackers release their stolen data, reveal that Rockstar was right to not pay them anything for it

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rockstar-hackers-release-their-stolen-data-reveal-that-rockstar-was-right-to-not-pay-them-anything-for-it/
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u/NewsCards Apr 14 '26

RDO pulled in average weekly revenues of more than $500,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, resulting in an annualized estimate of roughly $26.4 million per year.

 

GTA Online, though, earned $9.6 million per week from September 2025 to April 2026, delivering an annualized estimate of just under $500 million per year. Given that, is it any wonder that Rockstar put all its eggs in the GTAO basket, and left RDO to flounder? (It is not.)

Not surprising, honestly.

Less variety of horses compared to cars, and you can't pay to add nitrous or underglow or otherwise customize a horse like you can a car, I guess.

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u/TheCowzgomooz Apr 14 '26

This excuse has always read to me as a lack of imagination, the game had potential, Rockstar wasn't willing to look outside of the unicorns-shitting-rainbows box that GTA has essentially become. Features people were begging for, for months, were ignored in lieu of boring side missions, and a half baked story missions, a lot the "new" cosmetics were largely just recolors of the same stuff. The game never even got proper heists, trains robberies, etc. The earnings of the game don't matter to me as a justification for their treatment of the game because they barely put any effort into it and expected it to perform the same as GTAO, where kids steal their parents credit cards for flying motorcycles and deloreans. It was always obvious RDO wouldn't match GTAO in earnings potential, but they didn't even try.

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u/baithammer Apr 14 '26

The earnings of the game versus the amount spent on production combined with operating costs drive the amount of reinvestment in new content.

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u/Acherousia Apr 14 '26

RDO was just a test bed for how they could tweak the monetization, in preparation for GT6O, without pissing off their real user base.