GTA 6 May Borrow A Popular Feature From The Most Successful Games
Those takedowns could soon make a lot of sense.
Grand Theft Auto 6 could be the next big video game to turn the endless stream of creative, community made multiplayer modes and content into a lucrative revenue stream.
Rockstar Games is looking to take a page out of Epic Games’ and the Roblox Corporation’s playbook, according to DigiDay, turning the next installment in the open-world crime series into an all-encompassing platform. The outlet reports that the developer has contacted top creators for Roblox and Fortnite to work on content based on some of its biggest creations in other platforms for its upcoming game. These projects would allow these creators to customize in-game assets and environments to better fit their creations.
It’s not clear if these modes will be something content creators will be able to make money from, DigiDay reports. Considering games like Starfield, Skyrim, and the aforementioned Roblox and Fortnite pays its most reliable and successful creators, it’s far from an impossibility.
User made content is one of the biggest reasons Grand Theft Auto 5 remains one of the biggest multiplayer games around today.
Grand Theft Auto 5 has had unprecedented success as a multiplayer game over the last 12 years. But Rockstar wasn’t directly involved in some of the coolest features that keeps players coming back. Rockstar clearly wants to change that moving forward as it acquired Cfx.re — the team behind the biggest PC roleplay servers commonly featured on Twitch and YouTube — in 2023.
It’s probably a good idea to take DigiDay’s report with a grain of salt, since Rockstar hasn’t confirmed any details about GTA 6’s multiplayer features. However, it does seem like a logical next step for the series. Grand Theft Auto Online has millions of players that log in every day, and the amount of revenue the game rakes in quarterly for publisher Take Two proves that the fan base is deeply engaged.
While Roblox and Fortnite are both free-to-play juggernauts, both of those games are skewed towards younger audiences. Leveraging the recognition of gaming’s most popular franchise ever to create a more mature alternative to those games seems like a license to print money. Allowing creators to bolster the amount of content on offer is also a great way to keep the live service varied and interesting when Rockstar is in the midst of making multiplayer expansions.
Some of the most successful games in Roblox are entirely community made.
If this is all true, it could also recontextualize the more recent takedowns Rockstar and Take-Two has initiated against its creators. The disappearance of mods like the Vice City remake to the Liberty City Preservation Project (at the request of Rockstar) were the result of the company protecting its IP. But if it has plans to include and integrate creations in its next game, there’s a good chance these ambitious fan projects directly interfered with some of the locations, modes, and ideas that could appear in a more official capacity.
It also suggests that the company will continue to crack down on fans making these kinds of mods and projects. It would be a major loss, as the GTA community that’s been actively making cool mods for Rockstar’s games going back twenty years.
On the bright side, bringing these features directly into GTA 6 could finally extends these PC exclusive features to console in the same way games like Skyrim and Baldur’s Gate 3 have. It’s a fun feature that gives console players the irreplaceable joy of inserting giant fish men into your favorite games.
Either way, Grand Theft Auto 6 seems to be on track to release sooner than later. Despite a track record that suggests the upcoming game will slip into the following year, Take Two announced during its more recent earnings call that the game is still set for a Fall 2025 release. When it finally does release, there will be an unprecedented 12 years between Grand Theft Auto games, the longest ever wait between two titles in the popular series.
