Rockstar Was “Positive” That GTA Online Would Fail

Matt Freedman, who led technical cinematic work and mission design on GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Max Payne 3 during his time at Rockstar, sat down with Eldorado.gg for a wide-ranging interview. In the interview, he revealed almost nobody on the team thought GTA Online was going to work.

Rockstar Thought GTA Online Would Flop

When we were working on GTA Online, it was an afterthought. And we were all positive it was going to fail. Everyone thought this thing was going to fail.“

He recalled QA testers, the department he himself started in at Rockstar, coming to him directly with just how thin the mode was at the time. “We’ve got four hours of content for online mode. To do everything in GTA Online, it’s four hours,” he said they told him. “We are in so much trouble.”

The team’s plan at that point wasn’t much more than hoping for the best. “We’re going to do our best job anyways,” Freedman said of the mindset going into launch. What actually saved it, in his telling, was what came after: Rockstar committed to a steady stream of post-launch content once the mode found an audience, rather than treating the initial release as the finished product.

From Afterthought To A $10 Billion Machine

GTA Online’s turnaround ended up reshaping the entire franchise’s business. Rockstar’s continued support helped push GTA 5 past 230 million copies sold and drove the series to nearly $10 billion in total revenue over a 13-year run, largely on the back of a game mode nobody expected to matter. Freedman was quick to downplay his own role in that, joking that his actual code contribution to GTA Online amounted to little more than a couple of lines.

He’s also watching how that history might repeat, or not, with GTA 6. Rockstar launched GTA Online at a time when live service games and the industry wasn’t in the state it is right now, pointing to recent high-profile live service flops like Marvel Avenegers and how launching GTA 6 Online in the current climate could effect its longevity.

GTA 6 Online would have started development when games as a service were huge, and it would have finished development as games as a service are crashing,”

 Whether Rockstar can pull off the same kind of turnaround twice is, in his view, an open question, even for the studio that already did it once by accident.