Grand Theft Auto VI was delayed again, and there’s a magical little word in the press release that is the clue to everything: Expectations. “The goal is to try and exceed your expectations,” is the kind of thing you have to say in this kind of press release, and it means both nothing and everything. In this case, there’s a point in a successful developer’s career when it is no longer enough to succeed, which is to say, make a good and profitable game. You have to succeed spectacularly.
Case study: Allow an old man his memories.
Blizzard Entertainment was incredibly successful and well-liked before World of Warcraft (younger folks may not remember this, but yes, there was a time before World of Warcraft!), but WoW changed the game, not just for Blizzard, but for the industry as a whole. Where before, sales and subscribers for MMOs might be in the hundreds of thousands if you were really lucky (One figure cited EverQuest at 400,000 subscribers in 2002 after 3 years of existence, by contrast, World of Warcraft sold 240,000 copies in its first 24 hours of existence), the game changed. It was no longer enough to swing for a few hundred thousand. Now you had to be “The WoW Killer.” It had to be better than World of Warcraft in terms of sales, subscribers, and returns.
As someone whose failed career in video games is littered with several failed “WoW Killers”, this strategy had several problems: 1. Why would people who are happy playing WoW want to start all over from scratch in your thing? 2. Particularly when their friends are playing WoW? 3. Especially once WoW started getting expansions and had several years of content and most of the major bugs ironed out? 4. At some point, hasn’t everyone who wants to play this kinda thing already done that? (By the way, career advice, I asked a lot of these questions in meetings, and they made me very popular and beloved.)
You had to take down a giant in the genre, kill the king, and take the throne to get investors and/or make the shareholders happy. Eventually, even Blizzard admitted they couldn’t do it, and the bones and art assets of their next MMO project became Overwatch. 20 years on(!), the competition for World of Warcraft is servers with older variations of World of Warcraft and the limping legacy of failed “WoW Killers” that still hang around because they draw some revenue and subscriptions, but are still regarded as failures and disappointments.
Speaking of disappointment: per Statista, Grand Theft Auto V has lifetime unit sales of Grand Theft Auto V at over 210 million units as of February 2025. Day 1 sales were $800 million. So that’s going to be the absolute baseline and probably a disappointment for the almighty shareholders (remember Take Two is publicly held). Don’t think shareholders matter? Remember, Dragon Age: The Veilguard garnered 1.5 million players, which was 50% below EA’s expectations and was considered a disappointment. They do kind of have a point, considering Inquisition sold 12 million copies, though that was lifetime. On the other hand, who set those projects based on a vastly different gaming landscape for a series that hadn’t seen an installment in over a decade? On the other hand, shareholder capitalism demands that companies pursue the best returns for shareholders rather than merely breaking even or making a profit…so here we are.
The developers at Rockstar are faced with a situation where, to simply hit baseline performance, that is, to equal the success of their existing game, they have to sell at least 200 million units. The population of Brazil is about 212 million people. And that would probably be considered a disappointment. Imagine selling enough games to, quite literally, give one to everyone in the 7th largest country in the world by population and be considered a failure.
At some point, the demand for not just success and profits but exponential success and profits becomes absurd, and that, I think, is what is happening with Grand Theft Auto VI. No matter how polished and how good it is and how much content it has, at some point, we are going to hit the point where every single person on the planet who might possibly want to play Grand Theft Auto has. Will that be enough for the shareholders? Who can say?
But…to say it’s good enough to ship means that’s on your head and your career. And I possess no unique insight here. Maybe a few more months of polish and testing and art and design and whatever really will be the difference between success and disaster. But I am willing to bet a shiny nickel we are reaching the point where someone is looking at Day 1 sales of $800 million from GTA5 and sales projections for Grand Theft Auto VI and getting the shakes and, well, maybe if we futz just a little bit more…it will be good enough to meet those expectations. (Can it? Can anything?) And those projections and expectations were put together in what was a different world: We must consider the confounding variables of increased game prices, increased console prices, and tariffs hitting one major market, potential trade wars hitting the world economy, a potential recession, and who knows what the world looks like economically when it does ship. I’m not saying I’d want to make that call. But I never was an exec. I was one of the guys turning up at the office to find a mysterious all-hands meeting had appeared on his calendar, and his keycard didn’t work anymore.
The irony is they’ll lay off a bunch of people once it ships anyway, no matter how it does. No matter how the game industry has changed, that remains eternal.
