Rockstar has just added a long requested QOL improvement to Grand Theft Auto Online, and fans are not happy.
As reported by PC Gamer, the latest update had added the Vinewood Club App. As described in-game, the Vinewood Club App “lets you easily request vehicles, claim all outstanding business safe earnings, and replenish ammo on your in-game phone.”
To put it simply, the Vinewood Club App is Grand Theft Auto Online finally catching up to how people bank in real life nowadays. In the same way that you would probably do your banking transactions on your phone, via your bank’s mobile app, the Vinewood Club App lets you collect your cash from all your businesses with your player avatar’s virtual phone, instead of having to go all over the city.
So this sounds like a great feature that will save players a lot of time. So what’s the problem? The problem is this QOL improvement is only available to you if you subscribe to GTA+, the subscription program that Rockstar has set up for Grand Theft Auto Online.
This subscription is a monthly $ 8 real life subscription, but there’s more to it. Rockstar made GTA+ available only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. It’s one thing that this feature is not available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. While those platforms clearly still have a lot of users, roughly half of PlayStation users, and half of Xbox users, Rockstar can choose to end support for the older generation consoles, to keep pushing development of their game forward.
But GTA+ is also not available on PC, so if you were playing this game on Steam, Epic Game Store, or God forbid, directly from the Rockstar Games client itself, you can’t even choose to pay for the Vinewood Club App. You’re simply just not allowed to use it.
PCGamer has documented fans who aren’t happy about Rockstar’s choice, and yet, this situation illustrates the perfect irony of how gamers themselves create the situations that make this happen. Gamers may say they hate region locks, or DRM, or high prices, but if they keep playing these games that they keep on being successful, than the company making the games get a different message from what these consumers are saying.
Game companies like Rockstar will adjust to their consumers sometimes, but in too many situations the gamers capitulate on the issues they claim to care about. You can bet Rockstar is making a pretty penny on this one, and they are not incentivized to bring the feature to everyone. Having said that, we would be so happy if gamers proved us wrong on this one and actually bring pressure to Rockstar so that they have to make the change.
