When it comes to PC, GTA 5 and Online fans have been consistently getting the short end of the stick — but when we dig into possible reasons why, we just end up with more questions.
With the recent release of Bottom Dollar Bounties, a bunch of new activities, features, items and progression opportunities have arrived to GTA Online for players across Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC to enjoy — albeit a bit less for the latter.
A trend seems to be repeating itself, and fans of Rockstar Games still playing on the original gaming platform are seemingly left behind yet again — we must ask, why?
Bottom Dollar Bounties is far from the first instance where features are passing PC by, but it does stand to show a deepening feature disparity between the latest console generation and the platform where it all started — let's not forget the very first GTA launched on MS-DOS only before being ported to Windows, and then other platforms.
If we step back a few years for the sake of all-important context, we'll see that feature disparity across ports is par the course for Rockstar — however a key difference in past instances is a legitimately explainable reason caused by hardware limitations.
The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of GTA Online ceased getting new DLC after a while in a post-Enhanced Edition world, so that the beefier Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as well as PC, wouldn't be held back.
However, there is no hardware limitation to speak of regarding PCs in this day and age that would reasonably set them behind consoles — it is a constant in the gaming industry that PC is, generally speaking, the most technically capable platform at any time, being vastly more customizable and adaptable than consoles while also being untethered from a generation lifecycle.
PC being treated unfavorably has been apparent in different ways as well; fans had to wait over one and a half years for GTA 5 to hit PC, and Red Dead Redemption 2 made the jump well after launch too.
Cheating and hacking in GTA Online affected PC disproportionately, although admittedly Rockstar has been fighting hard against this phenomenon. More recently, with next-gen (current-gen?) improvements hitting GTA 5 and Online, many of said improvements were console exclusive.
Ray-tracing, animals in GTA Online, Career Progress in recent DLCs such as Bottom Dollar Bounties, and the GTA+ Subscription Service — itself controversial for locking quality-of-life improvements behind a paywall — are just some of the features that PC players do not have access to, even though there is no real legitimate hardware reason why these should be console exclusive benefits.
Looking to the future, with GTA VI announced for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 only thus far, it doesn't look like this trend will be broken anytime soon.
If we were to hazard an educated guess, the likeliest scenario is a port of GTA 6 to whatever the next-gen consoles will be once they launch, then add roughly a year to that before we see the game hit PC.
So, what is the reason for PC routinely getting the short end of the stick when it comes to major modern Rockstar titles? No official answer exists, of course, but in all likelihood it comes down to the thing that everything ultimately come down to: money.
It is generally accepted fandom knowledge that the GTA Online audience overwhelmingly play on consoles. Getting exact platform distributed sales figures is impossible, but to get a rough temperature various analytics sites estimate between 27 and 40 million Steam users own GTA 5. Naturally, Steam isn't the only way to own the game on PC, but this metric does help us see from where the wind is blowing.
As of May 2024, the official lifetime sales numbers of GTA 5 have crossed 200 Million units. Now, If we take 40 million Steam users, plus other storefronts, then suddenly PC doesn't seem like such a minor player after all, when you consider that the remaining rough ~150 Million units are spread out across six different consoles — and just two of those are getting preferential treatment.
Even if we stick to the lowball metric of roughly 27 million Steam owners, adding all hypothetical Epic Games Store owners, boxed copy owners and Rockstar launcher owners makes the PC a sizeable chunk of the overall playerbase.
Simplifying it down to "PC vs Consoles" there certainly is a huge disparity, but that could also be explained with the 18 month lead time Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 had over the PC port — and just the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 get access to exclusive features.
We theorize therein lies the answer — this isn't about market share at all. GTA 5 has been launched and sold in a slightly new edition coming up on four times now, and analytics seem to indicate a lot of players double or triple dipped, re-buying the game on new platforms repeatedly. By the time we got to the PS5 and Series X|S, customers needed some kind of incentive to buy a game from 2013.
The PC is perfectly capable to ray-trace GTA Online and play along smoothly with animals running around, but marketing these as next-gen exclusive features probably helped sell the game, again, on the latest platforms. If this scenario is accurate, it means there are chances Rockstar will simply patch these features into the PC port later on once the marketing angle is exhausted, if this ever happens.
We've got to admit, though, that there is one wound in this theory: GTA+.
In an industry where profits drive everything, it is an absolutely baffling decision not to make this subscription service available on PC where it would basically be "free money" for Rockstar and Take-Two. Is anyone buying GTA 5 specifically on current gen consoles just because of GTA+? We'd be shocked. But we're certain many PC players would subscribe given the chance.
Rockstar Games' strategy regarding GTA 5, and their modern games in general, on PC seems odd at best, and many fans would describe it less charitably. It doesn't seem to make the most financial sense, and we can only hope that things will fare better in the GTA 6 era. In the meantime however, it seems that Career Progress, ray-tracing and animals will remain a privilege of console players.
