I’ve spent money in GTA Online twice: once to buy the motorbike from Akira in a fetching pastel pink / blue combo and once to buy a jetbike that can fly and has missiles that easily target and destroy anyone anywhere on the map. While you can trawl around in shit clothes, a car that would fail most conventional MOTs and get by with just the basic weapons you take off of enemies, GTA Online is aspirational, and it’s hard to resist the pull of a brand new assault rifle or knock-off Lamborghini when all of your friends have them. GTA Online is one of the few MMO’s that just… gets a pass for being pay to win? At any point if you get tired of how little progress you’re making you can buy a cash card and just get an instant boost. How does it make so much money? The secret ingredient to the massively multiplayer crime-’em-up is microtransactions. Not bad for a game that came out in 2013. It is, by all accounts, a pretty big deal.

A study by Netbet in 2021 estimates Rockstar is making £655M a year out of the game. You can buy it on three different console generations.

Back in 2014 it had shipped 32.5M copies, and that number is now somewhere upwards of 150M. GTA 5 is probably the biggest entertainment product in the entire world. If I were a cynic and I am, sorry – you could say that it’s just that Red Dead Online just wasn’t making enough money for Rockstar to give a shit about its community. Make enough money and supporting your game really isn’t a big issue. READ MORE: ‘BioShock’ is still one of the most atmospheric, desperate shooters around.Red Dead Online has been killed off as Rockstar Games has announced it’s no longer going to support the game as they shift development resources to Grand Theft Auto 6.

This week, she’s taking a well deserved holiday, so you’ve got Jake Tucker with a bleak message: Red Dead Online would be thriving if only Rockstar had discovered a way to sell players a few flying horses. This Week in Games is a weekly column where Vikki Blake pulls apart the biggest stories in gaming each week.

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