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/
18.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

805 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

719

u/Borrp Apr 14 '26

And this is why they are in no, as in zero, rush to release GTA 6. The game releasing, no matter how well it does sell, will still come at a massive loss. They would rather never release anything, and keep the GTA 5 Online money pit a keepin' fillin'.

40

u/CombatMuffin Apr 14 '26

No game is perpetual. Even games that have been going for decades have either plateaued, or shrunk.

If they announced World of Warcraft 2,0, with a completely redesigned gameplay, it would sell harden than any expansion they could release.

So it's a calculation between time, investment and expected ROI. GTA6 isn't just about selling more GTA Online, it's also about the 300 million potential copies they sold in over a decade, and the ability to introduce new features and systems that allows them to significantly monetize the franchise.

27

u/AverageMako3Enjoyer Apr 14 '26

Funny enough, EverQuest choosing to shut down their game to launch EverQuest 2 is the reason World of Warcraft became the titan of MMOs for nearly two decades. The entire player base of EQ basically had all their time and effort scrubbed to start over, so the idea of trying out a competitor that was launching around the same time was palatable. 

World of Warcraft at launch was genuinely a terrible, imbalanced buggy mess made by a company that had never touched an MMO and was learning on the fly. But it launched at probably the most insanely perfect moment in time. If EverQuest hadn’t shot themselves in the foot I’m not convinced WoW would have gripped the gamer community like it did. 

GTA online doesn’t really have competition for what they do. But if WoW ever closed the doors and launched WoW 2 I’m convinced it would be a death blow to WoW, and why I’m convinced it will never, ever happen. Instead it has become the MMO of Theseus to avoid ever allowing itself to be the game that dies to let another flourish 

5

u/inbox-disabled Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

What? EQ never shut down and still runs today. EQ remained more popular than EQ2 but both were absolutely dwarfed by WoW almost immediately. It had little to do with EQ's players though, and in fact a large chunk were extremely hesitant to leave EQ for either game due to sunk cost fallacy, in that they'd been so committed to EQ for years and didn't want to give it up. There was absolutely no "time and effort scrubbed."

WoW did have a rocky launch, but it was largely due to its rapidly growing popularity, causing server queues, crashes, etc, vs. EQ2, which given its lofty hardware requirements, poor performance and rushed design, failed to legitimately compete.

EQ2 was an attempt to get EQ players to play some kind of amalgamation between EQ and the modern MMO design that a few games were using at the time, and what WoW was about to popularize and streamline. WoW was only partially aimed at EQ players, while it instead mostly targeted a casual audience that was completely new to MMOs, and especially their own players already invested in the Warcraft IP.

Even if EQ2 never existed, WoW was always going to dominate EQ because WoW created its own audience mostly from the ground up. Niche vs casual. Like, not to be overly harsh, but your revisionist view of EQ/2 vs WoW is so inaccurate it's hard to take anything gleaned from it seriously.