The market goes where the players go, who did not want the single player expansions of GTA V

Usually we only talk about the market based on personal tastesas if their needs were to become the model for everyone’s needs, making many speeches self-referential and out of focus with respect to reality. Today, what has been known for a long time has been reiterated: the single player expansions for GTA 5 have been permanently shelved due to the success of GTA Online. For some, it’s a shame, but there’s little point in complaining, because it was inevitable that it would happen.

If we want to give another “fault” to GTA Online, there is also that of having dilated the GTA 6 development times. If it hadn’t been there, Rockstar probably would have created a less ambitious chapter, but quicker to develop (always relative to a series like GTA, obviously).

There are no victims, nor executioners

The point is that by drawing certain conclusions we would be following an incorrect pattern, dictated by a series of underlying prejudices that arise from a now outdated way of understanding video games. GTA Online didn’t kill anything and didn’t lead to the cancellation of any expansions.

It is the players who have done it by pouring in millions into the online mode of GTA 5, which has become the main one of the experience, so much so that it has received hundreds of updates, absorbing all the support efforts of the developers. Or rather, let’s say it better: even the players didn’t kill anything. They simply found the entertainment they were looking for in GTA Online, rewarded Rockstar Games with billions in revenue, and the development studio adapted to what the numbers demanded.

Years ago I wrote in commentary of those who believed that investments in free-to-play and live services would also benefit traditional games, which was a pious illusion. Success only feeds itself. Time has proven me right, that is, the new economic models of video games have done nothing but occupy part of the space that was of the traditional model, in terms of investments, sending it into crisis.

Continuing to look for victims and executioners in what is a purely economic issue makes no sense and only creates a bile swamp from which nothing good can emerge. The market goes where the interest of players goes, understood in their broadest sense, and there is no doubt that, with the strengthening of internet networks and the development of increasingly accessible online games, trends have emerged that were previously not possible, widening the circle of the gaming population in unexpected directions.

Many people simply view video games as ways to interact with their peers. Many kids meet up after school in this or that game. Others join communities and stay there for years. Still others decide with friends what to play by choosing from games that have a cooperative mode and are accessible to everyone.

In other words, technological development has made it possible to make social interactions central to the experience of the medium and these have made the market. The big publishers, who are never brave, let’s remember, ran after the market, as they did before when it was made for the majority of single player games, simply because that was all there was.

So, the GTA 5 expansions weren’t cancelled because of GTA Online. The gaming audience simply told Rockstar Games loud and clear that they wanted it to invest in GTA Online, and the software house adapted.