Yesterday was an important day in the gaming industry because of the release of a certain indie title. The reason that the indie title’s release was so important was that it was highly anticipated, and then, when it was finally released, it basically broke the functionality of several digital storefronts, including Steam and the Nintendo eShop. Furthermore, many saw this game’s release as a “sign of things to come” regarding GTA 6. After all, just about every analyst and critic out there believes that when Rockstar Games finally drops its title, it will be the biggest thing in the history of gaming and make billions of dollars in one day.
That’s high expectations, and it’ll be interesting to see what records are broken upon release. However, not everyone is looking at the game with a sense of awe and wonder. Adam Lieb, who is the CEO of the marketing platform Gamesight, talked with IGN about the game’s arrival, and he put things in a more negative light:
“GTA has been this little bit of a black cloud that looms kind of over everything. So, that, I think, has caused people to be more hesitant with dates.”
We know this to be a fact because companies were waiting eagerly for Rockstar Games to give a release date so that they could move away from it. Heck, we even saw that with the indie game we mentioned earlier. Now, whether it’s a “black cloud” is up for debate, especially since it’s more like an event that you know is inevitable, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of it.
Lieb even went further in noting that thanks to its online community, some interesting things have been happening recently:
“What’s funny with GTA is, because we do a lot of genre analysis comparisons because of the RP servers. Someone’s built a horror GTA RP server or whatever, so that competes with Silent Hill somehow. And you obviously take that with a little bit of grain of salt, but the scope of that game is so large that it ends up competing with stuff that it otherwise wouldn’t.”
The online element is what gave the 5th entry such longevity and helped build the hype for GTA 6 even more. We don’t have any clues as to what the online element will be this time, but it’ll be revealed soon enough. In the meantime, it’s okay for certain developers to want to avoid the game’s release date, but don’t treat it like it’s the end of the world.
