Some time ago, Take-Two Interactive made a statement about how the publisher is going to have a major presence at this year's E3 event. Now, Take-Two has both 2K and Rockstar Games under their wing, however they didn't specify which of the two would account for that "major presence". 2K has been a regular presenter at E3 to some extent in the past, so that doesn't warrant a special announcement. Plus, 2K has mostly bared its cards by now.
Even so, until now the fact that it's going to be Rockstar that will show off some new game was mere suspicion. It was the logical choice, as they haven't revealed any major project since the launch of GTA V a whole 3 years ago. Granted, they've released new ports of the game for newer consoles and PC, along with a steady stream of new DLC — but none of this would have taxed Rockstar's resources.
An excerpt from a recent earnings report has finally officially confirmed that it is indeed Rockstar that will steal the show at E3 in Take-Two's name. If there was any doubt until now whether or not Rockstar is working on any new games, there is none now.
Rockstar Games is ofcourse hard at work on some exciting future projects that will be revealed soon
Take-Two counted GTA 5 to be the greatest contributing factor of revenue in the past quarter, despite high-profile new releases such as XCOM 2 and NBA 2K16 also having been released in that period. It seems that the gift of Shark Cards keeps on giving, as an even larger portion of income was attributed to microtransactions, rivaled only by the DLC for the Borderlands franchise.
The developer of GTA 5 also has a number of other franchises to their name. Most popular of these is Red Dead, the latest installment of which, Redemption, has achieved immense success on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Other famous series include Manhunt and The Midnight Club.
Following the massive success of GTA 5, having brought in over $3 billion in profit, Rockstar could develop a hit AAA blockbuster from the fraction of that cash — seeing as the total budget of GTA 5 was "only" $265 million. Fans have been waiting for a new game to be developed by Rockstar for a good long time. The team displayed a high level of expertise with pretty much all of their projects, making the community excited as for what they might come up with next.
Based on a recent statement by Take-Two about how the company already owns too many IPs, the chances of seeing a beloved franchise return from the dead. Of course, there is the chance that Rockstar plans on revealing the next GTA game (which could easily be a spin-off, not necessarily GTA 6" title="">).
However, seeing as they plan to keep GTA Online's current iteration active and profitable through 2020 at least, they probably won't be releasing a new game in the franchise for a few years, making such an early announcement pointless. Much more likely, however, is that they will take a different franchise out of the freezer.
The most likely candidate is, of course, Red Dead. While the franchise was originally kicked off by Red Dead Revolver, which shared many gameplay mechanics with Redemption, but had fewer features. The franchise only achieved mainstream success with the release of Red Dead Redemption, which is to this day considered one of the best games of the previous console generation.
Fans have been pleading Rockstar for a PC port of the game pretty much since launch, alongside a sequel. However not so much as an off-hand mention of the franchise ever occurred from official sources. If Rockstar really is going to drop a bomb at E3, then its likely to be a new Red Dead game — let's just hope it isn't merely a Red Dead Remaster, because that would be Red Dead Regrettable.
Then again, they could release a remastered version of RDR alongside the new game, similar to the way the new Call of Duty is launching alongside a remastered version of the original Modern Warfare, also known as the last good CoD game. Hopefully Rockstar won't make the same mistake of not selling it separately.
Should Take-Two opt to give the franchise a Red Dead Revival, chances are we'll see an Online component developed for it too. Since the game is basically Grand Theft Horse, pulling the mechanics of GTA Online over a similar game with a different setting wouldn't be hard. Let's just hope Rockstar pulls up a solid internal server park by then and avoids this peer-to-peer nonsense.
While "projects" doesn't exclude this from being the case, the formerly popular theory of Rockstar working on single-player DLC has been pretty much given up by the community following years of pleading and hoping only ever being answered by silence. Rockstar isn't likely to spend immense resources on a product only a fraction of the community will buy when they can either work on a fresh, new game — or just make more GTA Online DLC to drive up Shark Card sales.
The popularity of GTA 5 may have pre-determined the nature of the games we will get from Rockstar in the future. The reason the possibility for another Red Dead game is so high because it is the franchise that is most likely to Red Dead Replicate the success of this massive blockbuster. After all, if a game is still the primary source of income for a massive AAA company five years after launch, you know it was doing something right.
Then again, if Take-Two and Rockstar decide to have their cake and eat it too, they might decide to make the next open-world wild-west gunslinger game Online-only with single player component. If this happens, they'll probably have a Red Dead Revolt (okay, I'll stop now) on their hands.
What franchise are you hoping to see revealed/revived by Rockstar at E3 this year? Do you want a classic to return, or would you be happy with the announcement of the next GTA game?
