GTA 6 Online migration from GTA Online will be "a mess", Valve veteran warns
As the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 draws near, the biggest unanswered question hanging over the game is not about its single-player campaign, but about what happens to its hugely lucrative online mode. Rockstar has yet to say anything official about a GTA 6 Online, even though the multiplayer component of GTA 5 has remained a consistent money-maker for over a decade. Now a veteran of Valve has weighed in, arguing that persuading millions of players to abandon their long-built GTA Online characters and progress for a new game will be an enormous challenge.
Chet Faliszek, who spent 12 years at Valve writing for titles such as Portal, Left 4 Dead and the Half-Life 2 episodes, raised the issue in a recent YouTube short. He questioned what Rockstar intends to do with Grand Theft Auto 5 once GTA 6 arrives. “Are they just going to kill Grand Theft Auto 5?” he asked. “Is it just going to be one continuous thing that they move over and you get upgrades? Can you play it with either game? That would be crazy.”
The core difficulty, Faliszek explained, is that GTA Online players have invested years of time and, in many cases, real money into their accounts. GTA 5 has also been heavily discounted and even given away free through various promotions, meaning the barrier to entry has been extremely low. “At this point, someone's bought Grand Theft Auto 5 for, like, 50 cents, and they're playing it online for free. And that's their world,” he said. “What is Grand Theft Auto 6 going to bring us online that Grand Theft Auto 5 doesn't have?”
The prospect of shifting that player base is not straightforward, and Faliszek was blunt about the difficulty. “What are they going to do? That's a mess,” he said. He pointed to recent industry history, without naming specific companies, where developers have handled transitions in different ways. “We can all look through recent history, without pointing fingers, and see some people who did it by just total replacements. We can see people who tried to win people over and when that didn't happen, shut down the other thing. It's really hard to move people off.” Monetisation at the heart of the problem
Faliszek suggested that the real motivation for a new online mode is financial. GTA Online continues to generate substantial revenue for Rockstar and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, and a successor would presumably aim to build on that. “We all know: better monetization, right?” he said. “That's going to be their big innovation. They're going to have to figure out how to get you over to better monetization. You're in charge of Rockstar. How do you move people over to Grand Theft Auto 6 Online? Cuz you're making billions in Grand Theft Auto 5 Online, so you want to make even more billions on 6. How do you do it?”
Even the existence of a GTA 6 Online mode is not officially confirmed. Online features similar to those attached to GTA 5 were mentioned as part of Rockstar's ongoing union dispute, but there is no guarantee they will appear in the final game. That said, with the budget of GTA 6 speculated to run into the billions, it would be surprising if Rockstar or Take-Two ignored the revenue potential of a next-generation online mode.
One thing that appears likely is that any online component will not be available at launch. Rockstar has focused its public messaging on the single-player experience of GTA 6, and has not offered a single official word about online features, even with only days remaining until release. The studio has precedent here: GTA 5's online mode was switched on weeks after that game's launch. Faliszek believes a delayed rollout is a sensible approach. “I think this is why they're waiting to do it until after launch,” he said. “They're just saying 'oh, no, we're doing single-player at first at launch.'” No easy answers for Rockstar
Whatever decision Rockstar makes, it will not satisfy everyone. The studio could treat GTA 6 Online as a separate experience that runs alongside GTA 5 Online, but that brings its own complications. Alternatively, support for GTA Online could gradually slow as development resources shift to GTA 6, which would amount to a slow decline for the mode that defined the franchise's multiplayer for over a decade. Forcing players to start fresh in a new online world would be an uphill battle given how much they have invested in their current accounts.
Faliszek's comments highlight a dilemma with no clean solution. Rockstar is making billions from GTA Online and would presumably want to keep that revenue flowing, but moving that audience to a new game requires convincing players to leave behind worlds they have built over more than ten years. With GTA 6 set to launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, the studio has not said what its plans are for the future of its online modes.