GTA Online's Cash Grab Over Subscriptions May Change Gaming For The Worse

thegamer.com:

Last year, GTA Online made over $900 million, which is over $100,000 an hour. It makes a helluva lot of money, which might explain why Rockstar has continuously re-released the game on every console it can get its mitts on. Sure, it always sells these re-releases as graphical tweaks to the story mode, but while the main game is incredibly popular on its own, Online is what keeps the lights on. Assuming the lights are set inside diamond encrusted chandeliers, at least, because $100,000 an hour is an extortionate amount of money. Unfortunately, that’s not enough, so now a subscription service is being added.

GTA Online is as revilved as it is revered. There’s something about living in a society that sees the prices of basically everything rise while shareholders and CEOs continue to stuff their pockets with millions, watching our own wages stagnate, and feeling the consequences of an ever-growing wealth divide in society that makes us inclined to dislike things that make $900 million a year, but there’s more to it than that. GTA Online’s success has been blamed for the long delay in GTA 6 arriving in our hands, as well as the neglect of Red Dead Online - not to mention RDO’s identical structure despite it never really suiting the GTAO framework.

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Obviously, you don’t make $900 million a year doing nothing. People like GTA Online, and they’ve kept playing for almost a decade because it has maintained its high quality and given its players regularly scheduled events and updates that are the perfect mix of offering something new and exciting, plus offering the same, safe content that we know works well. It’s lazy to simply call GTA Online bad and move on, but of