When Grand Theft Auto 5 first launched in 2013, it felt incredibly timely. The game, which began development just five years prior, satirised contemporary society in sharp detail, making it feel immediately relevant to the political and social climate of the America it took place in. This is the way Grand Theft Auto works. It’s good because it felt honest to the time we were living in then.
Unfortunately, the world is very different in 2025 from the way it was in 2013. It feels like the world moves faster nowadays than it ever has. Back in the day, trends like Harlem Shake lasted for months. The Florida Man meme was created. People planked on horizontal surfaces in public for like, a year. Now, there are three Twitter main characters a week. The political stability of the United States could shift radically without warning on a random Tuesday. Memes and trends come and go in a matter of weeks, sometimes days.
And Grand Theft Auto 6 has taken much longer than its predecessor to make: over a decade and counting, to be precise. That’s twice as long, if you do some simple math. Considering that the GTA formula relies on that timeliness to really click on a thematic and narrative level, I’m not sure how that lengthy development cycle is going to gel with what the story requires on a base level to exist: timeliness.
Unless There Are Fortune Tellers At Rockstar, GTA 6 Is Already Dated
Video games feel increasingly dated nowadays, which is an unavoidable consequence of the process of making them taking much longer and costing so much more. Trends that were big in the industry seven or eight years ago are no longer important to players, which is why we’re seeing so many big-budget live-service games like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League fail so spectacularly.
Hardware has also seemed to have reached a limit in terms of technological capabilities. We’re hitting a wall when it comes to graphical fidelity, and considering the game’s format, I doubt that it’s going to do anything to shake up what we understand video games to be – a feat that was arguably already accomplished by Rockstar’s last game in 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2.
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It’ll be a massive open world game, released in a time when people are starting to get tired of them. Again, unavoidable. Not a lot of people expected gaming to look the way it does right now, but here we are. I’ve no doubt that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be obscenely detailed and offer a level of interaction we rarely see from the genre. But even then, there’s a debate to be had that we’ve already seen it all before.
But where we are culturally is surprising, too, and I can’t help wondering if GTA 6 is going to be able to keep up. We live in a time where The Onion headlines come true, because reality is really just that absurd. What was once considered satire precisely because it’s unthinkable is now very much thinkable, and in fact predictable. The United States has an initiative called DOGE, for crying out loud.
Doge is also a meme relic from 2013, by the way. Time is a flat circle and all that.
It’s Not Just GTA 6 We Have To Worry About
You know what else might not hold up? Borderlands 4. Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley has already written in depth about that game’s potential to fall flat, so I won’t beat a dead horse, unlike Borderlands 3 with its undying loyalty to 2010s humour. Avowed was criticised by some for its dated presentation when it launched earlier this month too, yet another present day relic that took so long to make that when it finally broke cover we were already tired of it. .
Meanwhile, games like Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii largely circumvent this problem by taking a significantly shorter time to develop than any of the bigger games out this year. This series is, of course, an outlier in the industry – there are few other studios releasing games of this size at this breakneck pace – but I’m reminded of how Infinite Wealth toyed with the idea of how the internet can be used as a cudgel against innocent people, something that’s especially relevant in today’s streamer-heavy, internet-infested world.
Can Grand Theft Auto 6 satirise contemporary issues – truly contemporary, not vaguely contemporary – with any accuracy given how long it’s taken to make? Can it feel as prescient as GTA 5 did when so much has happened in the span between its trailer’s release and now, let alone the beginning of its development? I find it hard to imagine how GTA 6 can keep up with the real world, but who knows? Maybe it’ll surprise me.