The time has come — all good things come to an end, and while Grand Theft Auto Online has found new life on modern platforms, showing no signs of slowing down, the world has moved on from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. GTA Online is shutting down on these platforms tomorrow.
As we rapidly approach the servers going dark permanently, GTA Online is busy celebrating the launch of the biggest update of the year on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, where Online is barreling forward stronger than ever.
Things have been building towards this shutdown on the launch platforms for a while now. We stopped getting content updates on the launch consoles back in 2015, and the character transfer feature was shut down in 2017, permanently isolating these initial versions of GTA Online. On these vulnerable older consoles, hacks and cheating ran rife severely impacting the experience.
At this point, we doubt a lot of people are still kicking on Xbox 360 or PS3. With no new content since 2015, just about everything you could possibly want to own in-game would have been easily acquired by now, and despite being absolutely loaded with content by default, all these years would make anything feel repetitive — the constant refresher or new content is what keeps the game going on new platforms.
Even so, it was on Xbox 360 and PS3 that GTA Online stepped on the path of becoming the gaming titan it is today, and the foundations of its unprecedented success were laid on these now-outdated systems. If any of you have some old consoles gathering dust somewhere in storage and a compatible copy of GTA 5, maybe now is a good time to hook it up and take a stroll through a significantly lower-res version of Los Santos one last time.
