BattlEye brings new battles to Grand Theft Auto Online as the game celebrates its 11th anniversary.
It's rare for any game to maintain strong sales a decade into its life, let alone record breaking sales over a decade into its life. Yet, 11 years after its initial release, here we stand celebrating Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto Online.
Released on October 1, 2013, two weeks after GTA 5 shipped on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, GTA Online survived a disastrous launch to help GTA 5 become the most profitable entertainment product of all time.
Although GTA Online's success has come at the expense of the potential earlier release of the sequel, and story DLC for the single-player mode — namely one that would've starred Trevor Philips in a more involved role, as confirmed by one of the game's developers and voice actor Steven Off earlier this year — its impact on the GTA community and the entire video game industry is undeniable.
GTA Online gives its players a massive world with endless possibilities, playing together with or against their friends. It was already fun causing chaos in Los Santos in 2013, but Rockstar has refined the gameplay, supporting GTA Online with updates and using it as a testing ground for future features for Grand Theft Auto 6. In doing so, Rockstar has given players more reasons to come back.
Between weekly updates, seasonal expansions, and other limited-time events — and, more importantly, a standalone release — GTA Online has become a separate entity, for better or for worse. It's now an integral part of the future of the GTA franchise, co-existing with future mainline titles.
Rockstar is currently working on the next GTA title, which, according to Take-Two Interactive's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, will set a new creative benchmark for the entertainment industry. It's a tall ask for sure, but we'll find out if it can live up to the expectations when it arrives next fall.
In the meantime, GTA Online players are celebrating its 11th anniversary, which admittedly could've been met with better circumstances. Over the past two weeks, GTA Online has become the subject of much debate following the release of BattlEye, an anti-cheat program designed to protect the game from hackers and cheaters.
It has already worked to some extent, resulting in the hacking community (if you can call it that) pushing back by threatening GTA Online servers with DDoS attacks. Some argue that it's a case of "too little too late", while others believe that it's never a bad idea to start protecting GTA Online, especially if the improvements made here can have a positive impact on GTA 6.
Unfortunately, Rockstar still needs to improve BattlEye, which has already resulted in a wave of false positive bans in GTA Online and made the game inaccessible to Linux and Steam Deck users. These issues remain unaddressed — though Rockstar and Valve are working together to fix the latter.
Rockstar is expected to release a new holiday update for GTA Online within the next few weeks.
