PC gamers angry about Grand Theft Auto 6 not coming to their platform at launch are rightfully upset, but there appears to be more reasoning behind the decision than selling the game again.
Former Rockstar Games producer John Ricchio—who worked at the company for years on games like Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Revolver, and Max Payne 3—says console hardware restraints have something to do with it, too.
Ricchio said as much in a recent episode of KIWI TALKZ podcast, highlighting how things worked during his history with the company. Granted, Ricchio left back in 2014, but he thinks prioritizing console is a deliberate decision.
“Most of the time you take what you’ve got and that’s a lot of times why people love developing initially on PC, and then porting over: ‘Before ship, we’ll get everything onto console,'” Ricchio said. “I think that’s less fashionable now, but there was a time where that was kind of a thing, where ‘we’ll make it run on PC and then we’ll go to these other platforms,’ and it just causes so much problems down at the end. So you’re much better off starting with the constraints.”
Those console constraints means Rockstar believes it makes sense to work on console version first and then tackle the more complicated PC development (where the game needs to run on a variety of builds and rigs rather than proprietary console hardware),
“Sometimes every once in a while, there’ll be advanced features that you can take advantage of later, that you can decide to plan for or not,” Ricchio continued. “But yeah, it’s always better to start with the constraints and then extend, because shrinking is a lot harder than extending. It’s way harder to make your game performant than it is to to just be like: ‘oh, we’ve got extra room, cool, we can de-optimize some things or make them more shiny.’”
I can certainly see where Ricchio is coming from, but there’s no way in the world that launching on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S first, followed by a PC release in a year or two is not also a business decision. For example, GTA 5 has been released and re-released multiple times over on different consoles throughout a decade, and the game’s been bought up like wild each time. Rockstar knows this. GTA 6 will likely follow suit.
Can both things be true? Yeah, and they probably are. Console is a priority because it’s a massive market and likely where the bulk of purchases would be made anyway even if a PC version launched alongside it. But in the end, if the PC version product ends up being better and the company can also make more money, then it seems like a no-brainer for Rockstar and that the toughest part of the equation is just PC gamers having to wait, unfortunately.
GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on Nov. 19, and a PC version is expected eventually but not yet confirmed. I can only imagine what those recommended specs will look like, and cost, by the time it comes out.
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