Dev says Rockstar ‘doesn’t have the money’ for GTA 6 on PC
While we won't quite go for those sensationalist headlines of "GTA 6 will be unplayable for millions in 2025," a huge chunk of the Grand Theft Auto fanbase might be unable to enjoy this new Vice City on launch day. As well as locking out PS4 and Xbox One owners (come on, you've had a good run), GTA 6 is facing some PC problems.
The inner workings of Rockstar Games are a mystery to most, and aside from the odd humungous data leak, the secrets of the GTA franchise are kept under lock and key. Now, one former Rockstar dev is spilling the tea and making some pretty bold claims about what's going on with GTA 6.
Ex-Rockstar dev has a warning about GTA 6 on PC
Click to enlargeFor those questioning why GTA 6's PC port is being held back from release, former Rockstar Animator Mike York told PCGamesN how the team will "prioritize what sells." That sounds like a logical way of doing things, but it's not like GTA is short of PC players.
In the past 24 hours, Steam Charts reports a GTA V peak of 234,816 players. That's not a million miles off the game's all-time peak of 360,761, so it's suspicious that we've heard nothing about a Steam or PC release of the new-gen Goliath.
York continued, "In the past, PlayStation was the big seller. What the developer would do is focus all their energy on making sure the PlayStation port worked really good. When I was working on Grand Theft Auto 5 for instance, we were concentrating on the PS3 and the Xbox, but we were mainly pushing the PS3 to the limit."
As for why PC players are left out in the cold, he added, "The PC version is kind of like the version that’s in the background. There’s always a PC version of the game, but it’s not quite polished. It’s just feeding the other games and making them work."
PC ports are apparently the most challenging because you have to optimise for such a wide array of hardware configurations when compared to the simplicity of PlayStation or Xbox. With different memory usage, simple processes can mess everything up, leading to more testing. Still, we're worried for GTA 6 on PC.
Rockstar apparently 'doesn't have the money for GTA 6 on PC
Click to enlargeConsidering GTA V has been going great guns for the past decade and is the most profitable entertainment product of all time, you might think Rockstar is sitting on a mountain of cash. It's not the case, as York said that if there were more staff, different teams could concentrate on different versions.
He concluded, "It just doesn’t work that way. We don't have the money, we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the manpower. So we just prioritize what's best for the company’s money. So let’s put all our money into the PlayStation, then the Xbox, then the PC."
We can't see a world where Rockstar doesn't release on PC, and this news of a delay shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. Back in 2015, Rockstar explained the struggles of PC ports, and with GTA 6 poised to be the biggest game of all time, the last thing we need is a situation similar to The Last of Us Part 1's glitchy debut.
