Recently asked why GTA Online fans might continue to invest time and money when a potential successor could replace it with GTA 6 later this year, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, without being drawn into specifics over unannounced games, teases the publisher has “shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”
What to do with live-service experiences that launch alongside periodical releases is a recent-ish design conundrum for games developers. Call of Duty’s battle royale offering, Warzone, was a banger, though we’re not exactly getting a new one each year, after all.
Grand Theft Auto, meanwhile, doesn’t target a new release each year, which means the question of GTA Online’s future has been allowed to linger much longer. Do you use design magic to bring its players, history, and more to GTA 6’s setting? You could wipe the slate clean, though that does raise questions over what you do with the original GTA Online – some folk won’t want to move on, given how much time and money they’ve invested.
IGN put that design conundrum to Zelnick, who notes that he won’t be drawn into talking about unreleased games but does offer a tease by pointing to Take-Two’s own history.
“I’m going to speak theoretically only because I’m not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn’t been made,” Zelnick says. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles.
“As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I’m not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017. If I’m not mistaken. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they’re alive and we have this massive audience.
“So we’ve shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”
So there you have it: GTA Online may cease to exist eventually, but that point isn’t guaranteed to be upon GTA 6’s release. Regardless, we won’t have long to find out.