Will GTA 6 save the video games industry or destroy it? – Reader’s Feature

With its Netflix extended look coming up, a reader ponders how GTA 6 will affect the rest of the games industry and if it’ll be for good or ill.

After years of rumours and trailers, that look amazing but don’t really tell you anything, we’re finally getting to get a proper look at GTA 6 with the Netflix show they just announced for later in the month. Obviously, I’m going to watch it, and I imagine it’ll be mind-blowing and pre-orders will go up by one trillion percent. GTA 6 is going to make more money than any other video game before it’s even out.

I don’t know whether it’s going to deserve that level of success, it’s hard to imagine that anything could, but that hardly matters now. People are hyped and money is already changing hands.

We already know that every other publisher (except maybe Nintendo) is terrified of releasing anytime close to GTA 6 but what I’m wondering is what happens afterwards? There’s plenty of games scheduled for January and February, including some big name ones, but do they really think the coast will be clear by then?

I see two ways that the launch of GTA 6 can go. The good one (for everyone and not just Rockstar) is that it’s a big hit, it’s a good game, and it raises up the profile of video games in general. Everyone is reminded how fun single-player games are (because I think that’s what it’s going to be at first, before the online is turned on).

Gaming seems to have been on a downward spiral ever since Covid, especially with all the layoffs and the total lack of new IP. So my hope is that GTA 6 makes gaming seem exciting again, not just for ordinary people but the moneymen that seem to have abandoned it recently.

That’s the best case scenario, as far as I see it, while the alternative, or at least one of them, is that only GTA 6 is successful. GTA 5 is already massively more successful than any other game ever made, except Minecraft and Roblox, but the rumour is that GTA 6 will also have fan-made content as well. And if it doesn’t it should do and I bet they put it in eventually anyway.

At that point you’re looking at a game that’s going to be so massive that most casual gamers would never even consider the idea of buying or playing anything else again. After all, that’s almost the point we’re at already with live service games.

If you can make a survival horror or a racing game or whatever within the tools of GTA 6 then what’s the point of making, or people buying, Resident Evil or Forza Horizon? That’s what publishers are already worried about with Roblox and they’re only lucky there that it looks so janky and it’s mostly used by kids.

Given how good the graphics are on GTA 6, if you’re able to make anything you want in it – or even just a wide variety of things with a modern day setting – then the whole concept of there being other video games, as we’ve always known, it could be risk.

Maybe the worst thing here is you can’t really blame anyone. Rockstar is being greedy not supporting physical discs (something I bet they organised with Sony) but it’s not their fault GTA 6 is so popular or the graphics are so good. They haven’t achieved their success in any kind of unfair way. Other publishers have had 13 years to make a rival to GTA 5 and no one’s even tried.

Even so, I don’t think anyone could pretend that having GTA 6 become the only game anyone ever plays is anything but a bad thing. Even if that’s an exaggeration, and older gamers still play other games, it seems a very unhealthy situation. Sometimes you can be just too successful.

By reader Si

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