The latest GTA 6 delay means Rockstar’s new GTA game will launch a whopping 13 years after GTA 5. It’s an unprecedented length of time between launches in a successful franchise — and a luxury out of reach for most studios. So why can Rockstar get away with such a long development cycle? The answer isn’t just that Rockstar has the money to take its time, though the continued retail success of GTA 5 means it certainly has that advantage. The long development cycle was essential for GTA 6 to stay relevant after launch, according to DFC Intelligence president David Cole.
“Investors have been following GTA for 24 years since Rockstar’s big breakout with GTA 3,” Cole says. “It’s not like any other property out there, and they have the ability to take their time doing what they want, a privilege other developers would love to have in a market that expects you to churn out games as fast as possible.”
Rockstar and GTA developed that reputation thanks to a fortuitous combination — ideas no one else was using, mechanics nobody else thought to combine, and a level of polish that was unusual at the time. Competing with GTA was too challenging, so other studios just didn’t try. Cole says that gave Rockstar an advantage with consumers, but the studio still faced corporate pressure. (Investors, of which Cole was one between GTA 3′s launch and GTA 4, regularly pestered Rockstar about making more GTA, faster, without understanding the effect it would have on product’s quality or the brand’s image.) GTA 5‘s success silenced those calls for quantity over quality, and gave Rockstar the luxury of taking its time with GTA 6.
“[Now], GTA is its own planet circling its own sun,” former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden told Polygon as part of a broader conversation about the road ahead for console games. “We know that when it lands, it’s going to have a blast radius. Six weeks either side of when it comes out, it’ll take over everything that we know. [But] there comes a point where the white-hot anticipation for your title becomes more of a burden than an encouragement.”
That’s the situation Rockstar finds itself in ahead of GTA 6‘s launch, with expectations of success and metrics for measuring it looking far different than what they were in 2013. Taking so long to make a new GTA game keeps the brand undiluted, Cole says, which lends a sense of prestige and rarity that makes it easier to catch people’s attention when there is something new to announce. It also keeps people from burning out on it, like with Marvel and Star Wars fatigue. But in the absence of new releases, the brand starts taking on an identity separate from the actual games.
“There’s a sense that everybody plays this, so everybody wants to do it. So for GTA 5, for example, you get 14- to 15-year-olds who, once they’re allowed to play Grand Theft Auto, want to go buy it because they’ve heard about it all their life, and maybe their parents didn’t let them play until now,” Cole says. “It’s become an experience that every gamer wants to try.”
The success is something Rockstar will struggle to replicate and probably never will.
“I think [GTA 6] is almost guaranteed to be the biggest entertainment product ever,” Cole says. “The concern is, will it have those long legs that GTA 5 did? Will people be playing this 10 years from now?”
Cole says it’s more likely that the company will prioritize keeping people engaged through GTA Online, rather than recreating the watershed moment of GTA 5. Rockstar faces the challenge of attracting new audiences who don’t care about GTA and re-attracting people who bought GTA 5 out of curiosity, before moving on to something else. It’s the same problem staring down every developer across the industry: keeping people’s interest.
The proliferation of live-service and free games poses more obstacles for GTA 6‘s long-term success than GTA 5 had to contend with, and the solution, as Cole sees it, is regular updates to keep people coming back. But you’re probably not going to get that with the single-player game. Rockstar might launch smaller DLC stories like it did for GTA 5, but the more likely approach is further reliance on GTA Online — funnel players in with the single-player game before shifting them over to the online component.
GTA Online launched in a bug-ridden state, and people expect regular updates and improvements over time — not instant perfection. They’re willing to wait for that. The point is to make them care enough to wait for it, hence the need for GTA 6 to launch in a state as close to perfect as possible. Otherwise, Rockstar would be left with a short-term bump from the initial release and little else.
Cole contends that Rockstar will achieve that success and points to the recent GTA 6 delay as proof.
“The long development cycle, when you get down to it,” Cole says, “is Rockstar ensuring that they’re over and above when GTA 6 comes out, that they’ve got all the content ready to go, and can keep people in for a long time.”
Jen Glennon contributed reporting to this story.