A developer who worked on GTA 5 says Rockstar ‘prioritise what sells’, and goes into great detail about why a PC port has been left till later.
GTA fans will have waited 12 years for GTA 6 when it finally launches in 2025, and the anticipation is obvious, as the first trailer hit 100 million views in less than two days.
The trailer confirmed that GTA 6 will have two protagonists, in a Bonnie and Clyde type partnership, and that it will be set in Vice City – the franchise’s version of Miami.
That’s only for console players, however, as PC gamers will have to wait even longer, with no indication of when the game will be out for them.
There are two main hurdles to overcome when porting the game to PC., according to ex-Rockstar developer Mike York, who has worked on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
One issue is that the PC’s architecture is different from consoles, and the other is that Rockstar prioritises consoles first, because that’s what sells the most copies.
‘The reason why a PC port comes later and not the first thing that comes out, is because they want to prioritise what sells.
‘Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have. It sold more than any other console for the most part,’ York told IGN.
York says that for GTA 5 Rockstar developed it for PlayStation 3 and built an Xbox 360 port as they went along, and work on the PC port only started after the game was released.
GTA 5 wasn’t released on PC until 2015, a year and a half after the initial launch, but seeing how popular the game has become, especially GTA Online, it probably won’t take that long for a PC port to arrive for GTA 6.
York goes much further in explaining exactly why the PC has been an afterthought in the past, although none of it is exactly new information:
‘They have to accommodate for all these different things that can happen. Because on a PlayStation and an Xbox, each one of those has one graphics card, and it’s the same graphics card, it’s the same architecture inside the box as every single PlayStation that’s shipped to millions of people.
‘But when it comes to a PC, every single person has a different PC. They’re running it differently. They have different hardware in there. They have different CPUs and GPUs. The memory usage and the different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes hit a fail and mess up during different configurations. It’s hard to explain, but that’s what it boils down to.’
York says that testing the game for PC multiplies tenfold because of this:
‘When you’re doing the PC port you have to test things on multiple different hardware, different GPUs. Not just one or two, but 10 or 20. There are so many different configurations out there that you’ll just never be able to test them all.’
None of that is unique to Rockstar though, so it still doesn’t really explain why other publishers can release a PC version at the same time as consoles but they can’t.
The only difference is the size of the game, which will certainly make testing difficult, but perhaps Rockstar is seeking to avoid the performance issues that plague many modern PC games that launch day and date with the PC.
Although if that is the case they didn’t show much of that same insistence on quality when it came to the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which launched in a terrible state on all formats.
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