The Decade ‘Grand Theft Auto Online’ Owned

It’s another beautiful day in Los Santos. The bright California sun glints off the asphalt as you and another friend tear down the freeway and shoot the shit over voice chat, yo-yoing between real-life concerns and those of Grand Theft Auto Online’s teeming virtual world. What will you do? Play a game of poker? Hike in the mountains? Stage a bank heist? Just as you’re about to decide, a helicopter careens onto the road, swiftly followed by another, causing a cavalcade of cars, including yours, to explode in a series of frame-rate-obliterating explosions. As the screen judders, you scramble to process what’s just happened. With more than a little glee, your friend notes the names of your harebrained killers, which just popped up in the bottom-left corner of the screen. You set out to enact virtual revenge.

For as long as Grand Theft Auto has been presented in 3D, the franchise has been defined by an elegant balance of low-stakes idling and intense, over-the-top action, the latter becoming the incendiary calling card of the world’s favorite organized crime simulation. That tension between calm and chaos is only exaggerated in GTA Online, the online multiplayer counterpart to Grand Theft Auto V. In GTA Online, you hang out with friends in relaxed, social moments instead of going on the single-player game’s stilted, simulated dates; combat encounters are more frenzied because they pit you against real people, not AI enemies; sunsets appear all the more exquisite because you have someone to share them with. In some ways, GTA Online is the potential of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series realized in its most extreme form: all the beauty, ugliness, fun, and bloodshed of the single-player games amped up to 11.

It took a long time to get to this point. GTA Online launched on October 1, 2013, a few weeks after the single-player portion of GTA V, but not as a stand-alone title: The online mode hid like soldiers in a Trojan horse within GTA V. If you were one of its early players, you were liable to experience technical difficulties like inaccessible servers, inexplicably deleted save files, and generally sluggish performance. While GTA games, like Bethesda’s open-world games, could often be buggy as a result of their complex sandbox natures, this was something else. In a notable moment of disclosure from the generally guarded Rockstar, GTA Online’s then-director of design, Imran Sarwar, said in 2017: “It’s one of our biggest regrets that we lost millions of players in that first year that have never experienced how much we have improved and added to the game since the early days.”

Eventually, Rockstar turned the game around to the point that its influence and success now arguably eclipse that of the single-player game. While it’s difficult to separate the successes of the two precisely because of GTA V’s hybrid nature—part classic single-player experience, part live-service title—a few figures stand out. In 2017, analyst firm SuperData reported that GTA Online alone had raked in $1.092 billion through microtransactions, accounting for, to that point, an eye-watering 78 percent of the game’s total revenue. Earlier this year, Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company, bragged that the GTA franchise had generated $8.33 billion since GTA V’s release. If GTA Online brought in a sizable percentage of that figure, it would make the game a redemption story of stratospheric proportions, from rocky start to multibillion-dollar behemoth.

Yet there was nothing out of this world about this accumulation of riches. To borrow the game’s own gangland vernacular, it was achieved mostly through the pushing of virtual trinkets: fancy clothing, pimped-out weapons, muscle cars. This meta-narrative dovetails with GTA Online’s perfectly: Both center on the accrual of hard cash in a hyper-consumerist world, and both are aspirational fables for the new Gilded Age.

Despite the broad mass appeal of GTA, a series that broke records for entertainment launches even before the release of its fifth installment, few predicted the extent to which GTA Online would resonate with players. “When [Rockstar] first announced GTA 5, and then GTA Online as a sort of separate thing, but the only way to get it was by buying the main game, I felt like they were trying to pull some weird marketing trick,” says Brendan Sinclair, managing editor at GamesIndustry.biz. It reminded Sinclair of Metal Gear Online, the multiplayer spinoff bundled with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots in 2008. That game was canned after four unsuccessful years; GTA Online, meanwhile, has only gotten bigger, and not just in terms of player numbers. Viewers on Twitch have flocked toward the game, which Axios recently labeled “must-see virtual theater.” People don’t just love playing GTA Online; they love watching it, too.

“I was very wrong,” admits Sinclair. “In my defense, Take-Two also did not expect it to be what it was.” Over the past 10 years, GTA Online has grown into a live-service game with rare staying power, a “forever” title that stands up to the scrutiny of repeat play. Its twinning with the solo narrative of Grand Theft Auto V means that it also embodies perhaps the biggest transition in video games over the past 10 years: the pivot from single-player experiences to the always-online, live-service model. GTA Online’s success, says Sinclair, “convinced Take-Two of the potential of games as a service.” Now, microtransactions (or “recurrent consumer spending,” in the parlance of Take-Two’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick) are the economic bedrock of Take-Two’s NBA 2K franchise. The resulting profits, alongside GTA V’s, helped put Take-Two in position to commit $12.7 billion in early 2022 to acquire mobile and casual games giant Zynga, a company whose fortunes were built on precisely the same model.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that GTA went online. The offline single-player game was always more fun with friends who could pass the controller to enact joint destruction and crack up at the results. On the other hand, the transition has, at times, felt like something of an artistic compromise for a series that, until GTA V, was doggedly single player, cinematic, and tightly authored. Auteur theory has never really been applicable to Rockstar; GTA games and their stories are gigantic collaborations headed up by a creative team that, until recently, included Sam and Dan Houser, art director Aaron Garbut, and designers Leslie Benzies and Imran Sarwar. But the stories Rockstar tells in open-world sandbox form are auteur-esque in their meticulousness. By moving the franchise online, Rockstar handed greater control to players and naturally ceded some of its own directorial vision—to the extent that a unified vision for GTA Online existed in the first place.

Zack Zwiezen, a staff writer at Kotaku who has racked up more than 720 hours in GTA Online, was one of the very first players to step into the online version of Los Santos. “I started playing it literally the day before it came out because they actually did an early, unannounced launch of the servers,” he says. “They sneakily turned the switch on.” Zwiezen dodged the technical issues that soured many players on the game from the get-go, but he nonetheless found it lacking in more substantive ways. You could play golf, arm wrestle, watch a movie in a theater—all the weird, ancillary, interactive vignettes that you’d find in single-player GTA. But there were no heists, and what missions existed were simple affairs like low-level drug runs. Zwiezen points to the first big content drop, which should have been a major statement of intent, as an example of Rockstar’s seemingly purposeless approach. The Beach Bum Update in mid-November 2013 introduced only a handful of new vehicles and weapons, one of which was literally a broken bottle. “I don’t think they knew what they were doing,” he opines. “It was just a very empty, boring kind of experience.”

Cass Marshall, a staff writer at Polygon who regularly covers GTA Online, remembers that the initial offering felt “a lot smaller in scale and stripped down from what currently exists.” It was focused more on “petty crime, drug crime … you know, go ahead and get some cocaine from that street gang, steal this car that a guy defaulted on paying,” they say. “You definitely could get some fancier things like a condo in the nicer neighborhoods of the city. But the sheer wealth and opulence that is the focus now just wasn’t really there.”

GTA Online underwhelmed a lot of people, including critics. This reception stood in stark contrast to that for the single-player portion of GTA V, which was met with mostly rapturous acclaim: a “misanthropic masterpiece,” according to The Guardian; “the best game in the series to date,” said The Verge. In a measured and insightful 6 out of 10 review of GTA Online for GameSpot, Carolyn Petit observed: “There’s no greater purpose to fight for. … The result is a nihilistic world in which life is dirt cheap, with players constantly gunning each other down for no reason whatsoever.” IGN declined to score the game because of its “changing nature,” but reviewer Keza Macdonald described it as “a color sketch of what it will probably one day become.”

Unlike the multiplayer modes of games in the aughts and early 2010s, which could often feel like tacked-on exercises in back-of-the-box feature ticking, GTA’s had been in the works for “many years,” the then-president of Rockstar North, Leslie Benzies, told GameSpot a few months before launch. In fact, the company had started creating an online component a number of times previously before dropping it for undisclosed reasons. This makes GTA Online’s limp start all the more puzzling. Still, in the same interview, Benzies stressed that such a game would be a work in progress. “We want it to grow into its own world. We want it to be its own master,” he said, before gently letting fans know that they should expect a few bumps in what was destined to be a long road. “It is a nightmare; we’ve not done anything on this scale before. … But this is going to be an ongoing thing. There’s not going to be any rest.”

In a separate interview, one of Benzies’s colleagues, Rockstar cofounder and GTA writer Dan Houser, appeared to be in an altogether more carefree mood. “It’s more about, ‘We built the world, you go in there and have fun,’” he said. “We have lots of ideas of how that might evolve and we will work with the audience to see what directions they want to go, because it’s easy enough to make small bits of content for [GTA Online].”

But small bits of content couldn’t have been further from what the game needed. GTA Online was “slowly failing, and quickly losing players,” design director Sarwar recalled in 2017, precisely because the “updates were not interesting enough.” He argued that the “turnaround” arrived with the release of heists in March 2015, 17 months after the game’s initial debut. These showstopping, Heat-esque set pieces, a cornerstone of the single-player campaign, proved exceptionally difficult to translate to multiplayer. “[Heists] were not looking like they would live up to our own standards,” Sarwar said, “and had to be completely redesigned from scratch.” Like GTA Online itself, the development of these missions was started, restarted, and delayed until Rockstar was confident they lived up to the company’s exacting standards.

Sarwar’s diagnosis checks out, according to Zwiezen: “[With heists] it felt like they were starting to figure out what this thing was. … That was the moment people went, ‘Oh OK, I get it now.’” Marshall concurs: “I don’t think the heists were accepted as amazing, untouchable, quality pieces of design, but people sat up and went, ‘I want more of that.’” Marshall also argues that heists “set a tone of escalation” in which players were guided away from humble pastimes like dealing drugs and popping gang members. Soon enough, they were engaging in corporate espionage and taking down private military companies. The game would grow to incorporate private arms dealing and even weirder material, like a flying bike called the MK Oppressor II. It was part of a slow transition, Marshall says, toward a “fantastical realm”—think Michael Bay meets Michael Mann with a dash of Paul Verhoeven.

Heists, with their gigantic virtual paydays, flooded the game world with new money, and so did subsequent updates like 2016’s “Further Adventures in Finance and Felony.” Players could own businesses and purchase warehouses to store contraband goods. They could even hire other players to become bodyguards, a sure sign of status in this online world. It was all a far cry from the early days of the game. “I remember grinding the same mission 200 times to get the money to buy a house,” Zwiezen says. “And then I just sat in the house and smoked weed and watched TV. I realized I had no reason to own it.” Compare that with the later endgame, a fantasy in which you are unspeakably rich, a figure who resembles a cartoon version of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos more than Tony Montana and someone who does heists just for the fun of it and splurges in the most conspicuous ways possible. In a post-Occupy world, GTA Online grants you the dream of being the 1 percent, a self-regarding goal that sits in contrast to the more wholesome questing found in the likes of World of Warcraft.

Driving around Los Santos in free mode as this 1 percenter, you’re constantly reminded of your rarefied status by the pings of job offers from other players on the left of the screen. Some of these appear in bright red letters targeting the worst off in the game world. They carry the telltale sound of scams. “Are you poor in GTA V? Just want to have some fun without grinding?” reads one of them. Another tries to lure you to a Discord server. Here, in Rockstar’s peerless and postmodern satire of capitalism, it feels entirely fitting that real-life hustles should rub shoulders with virtual ones.

On April 12, 2016, Benzies, the former president of Rockstar North, filed a lawsuit reporting “numerous deceptions” by his longtime collaborators Sam and Dan Houser, Take-Two, and Rockstar, the company that had employed him for nearly 20 years. The crux of the grievance stemmed from unpaid royalties that Benzies felt he was denied following his sabbatical in September 2014. But the origin of the grievances dated back further, according to Benzies: specifically, to the release of GTA Online. In the 70-page suit, Benzies alleged that Sam Houser expressed “unhappiness” that it wasn’t his name at the end of the credits in GTA Online but Benzies’s, who was credited as producer and game designer. So said the suit: “In gaming, the last position denotes the most significant contributor to the game.”

The Houser brothers and Rockstar immediately clapped back with a countersuit and statement declaring that Benzies’s claims were “entirely without merit and in many instances downright bizarre.” What surfaced amid this fracas was the existence of three “Rockstar Principals,” which contractually entitled the two Houser brothers and Benzies to a greater share of profits than they had previously enjoyed. Benzies alleged that GTA V, a veritable golden goose, had generated more than $3 billion in revenue, with much of it stemming from his work on GTA Online and the virtual goods it sold via microtransactions. “These purchases have a nearly 100% profit margin,” his suit argued, “subject only to nominal development costs and app store commissions.” As Benzies and his lawyers correctly predicted, “GTA Online has the potential to achieve the greatest profit margin of any game created in the GTA franchise.”

For a devoted group of GTA Online players known as “role-players,” the real-world fallout between Benzies and the Houser brothers (which was settled confidentially in 2019) likely couldn’t have been further from their minds. They were too busy subverting GTA Online’s kingpin narrative by working more quotidian jobs: truck driver, lawyer, mechanic. In the single-player version of GTA, these kinds of jobs would be handled by non-playable characters, programmed in such a way that their activities mimicked the hustle and bustle of a city. On role-play servers, players took on these banal jobs themselves, eschewing the game’s usual goals to make their own emergent fun by improvising with other role-players. Imagine a more performative version of Second Life in which everyone follows the strict rules of engagement laid out by the server. The golden rule? Stay in character.

Marshall, who is a volunteer moderator on a role-play server, draws a contrast between the GTA Online base game, which has become “more incredible, fantastical, and action movie,” with the relatively understated role-play scene. You won’t find guided missile strikes on role-play servers; rather, role-players aim to cultivate a “more realistic experience,” which complements the game’s grounded, contemporary, real-world setting. “Role-play servers tend to pull back,” Marshall says. “You’re gonna be driving around dealing with cops at traffic lights who are making sure you’re wearing your seat belt—lower-level concerns.”

According to Marshall, the scene exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns. “GTA V really feels like the pre-pandemic, late-2010s era,” they say. “During the pandemic especially, you had people who were craving that era. They would go to a [Los Santos] nightclub or become DJs, socialites, or politicians. It was a social network that didn’t require you to research a fantasy world. It was very accessible and easily understandable as a concept.” In April 2021, the FiveM mod, which enables players to set up their own customized servers for role-play mode, became even more popular than the base game, attracting a peak of 250,000 concurrent players, compared with the official version’s 124,000. High-profile streamers such as xQc jumped on board alongside other big names like summit1g. Rapper Lil Durk launched his own role-play server. The role-play community even inspired an art house documentary called Sandbox, which examined the essential oddness of millions of people playing the most mundane game imaginable.

The rise of GTA Online role-play and the way it furthers the popularity of the game, all while giving players an endless spool of narratives to partake in, speak to the strange dynamic of the game’s success. “It’s another part of the story,” Sinclair says. “How much of this has been—I don’t quite want to say accidental, but—serendipitous?” In 2015, Take-Two banned the developers behind FiveM before sending private investigators to the home of one of its founders. In a now-deleted post on Reddit, the modder said the PIs had connected him by phone to someone who said that Rockstar wasn’t “willing to accept any solution other than ceasing my activities.”

Fast-forward to August 2023, when Rockstar made a striking U-turn: The company purchased Cfx.re, the team behind FiveM, for an undisclosed sum. “The community was taking this game and bending it to their own interests and finding great success with that. And Rockstar’s first reaction was to try and shut it down because it wasn’t happening in the way that the company was comfortable with,” Sinclair says. “That, I think, is as good an indication [as any] of how this thing happened outside of the control of Rockstar, and that it was smart enough to pivot and embrace what was happening. … Because I don’t think communities in games like this can be manufactured at whim. No matter how talented or insightful a team of developers or publishers may be, I think there absolutely is a lightning-in-a-bottle element to this.”

The big question is where Rockstar will take GTA Online next. The next installment in the franchise, GTA 6, sits on the horizon, likely slated to arrive between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025, if you read between the lines of Take-Two’s financial forecasts. (The company predicts more than $8 billion in net bookings for fiscal year 2025, a 50 percent increase over its previous record high of $5.3 billion, achieved during fiscal year 2023.) Bearing in mind the colossal revenue that GTA Online has sustained over the past 10 years, it’s almost inconceivable that Rockstar and Take-Two would not attempt to replicate that success for the next decade.

But it’s difficult to ask players to ghost a game that they’ve sunk many years into if all that progress would dissipate the moment they log into the shinier sequel. Thus, the makers of GTA Online find themselves in a bind—and, according to Zwiezen, wrestling with conflicting emotions: “The feeling I get from Rockstar whenever I’ve talked to people or gotten information is that there’s a group within Rockstar who don’t really know what to do with GTA Online,” he says. “And there’s also a group that kind of hates it now because it’s like Frankenstein’s monster. They’re going to want players to move to GTA 6, but I don’t know if they’re going to be able to get people to switch to GTA 6’s multiplayer because it’s probably going to launch with a pretty small amount of content. It’s going to feel like asking people to go and regrind a decade of their criminal career.” Ultimately, Zwiezen says, “They don’t know what to do with this thing. It’s like they’re afraid of what they’ve created.”

What Rockstar has created, beyond a multibillion-dollar live-service behemoth, is a framework for the modern era of blockbuster game production. During the high-definition era ushered in by the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation of consoles, triple-A games, whose differentiating factor is visual fidelity and scope, have taken longer, and grown exponentially more expensive, to produce. Sinclair describes this process as the “triple-A arms race.” To justify that expense, publishers have sought longer revenue tails from their games. They looked to downloadable content and expansion packs first before collectively shifting to the free-to-play, games-as-a-service mode. The latter isn’t an innovation per se: Games in Asia like Perfect World made bank with that strategy in the aughts, as did Facebook browser titles such as FarmVille a few years later. Rather, it’s the application of the model to the triple-A realm that turned out to be novel and, of course, hugely lucrative, not just for Rockstar and Take-Two but also for other publishers like Electronic Arts (see the FIFA series of soccer games) and Epic Games (see Fortnite).

“[Triple-A publishers] eventually learned that having to go back to people and start a new marketing cycle every time you had a new expansion dropping, or to get that hype around things to bring people back into an experience, was costlier and harder than just keeping them in the experience and not letting them leave in the first place,” Sinclair says. “Because there’s an inertia to our habits. If you can get someone to habitually make your game part of their life, part of their routine, then you can continuously draw money from them over the long haul.”

In this sense, GTA Online foreshadowed and, perhaps, helped pave the way for Fortnite and many other modern live-service titles that foreground the accumulation of stuff. Fundamentally, it’s a virtual take on keeping up with the Joneses. Yet there’s no denying the deep experiences and memories that GTA Online has fostered for its millions of players. It’s where Zwiezen and his girlfriend (now wife) went on dates when they lived apart, and where players hosted a funeral for the rapper Takeoff. The game has also birthed no end of bizarre, seemingly unscriptable moments (like when purple and green aliens fought one another in beatdown gangs), as well as its own thriving subculture of virtual stunt drivers.

Rockstar has facilitated this growth during a decade when many of its creative powerhouses have departed. Director of design Sarwar left in 2019, and of the three “Rockstar Principals,” only Sam Houser remains. His brother, Dan, now runs Absurd Ventures, a multimedia production company, while Benzies set out to make his own successor to GTA Online, a game whose title, Everywhere, screams ambition and maybe also a little hubris. Judging by a brief trailer and assorted previews, it aims to give players even more tools to create their own content, à la Roblox for grown-ups. Importantly, Benzies’s new game appears to be inverting the Trojan horse of GTA V by leading with the online portion of the game; a cinematic single-player experience called MindsEye sits inside it, a clear sign of the shifting priorities of blockbuster games.

Something else fundamental has changed, too, but this change dates back further. Jamie King, cofounder of Rockstar, once described 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III in terms of its autobiographical nature. “It was about kind of mirroring what life is for us growing up,” he said. “You are running around and, whether you like it or not, you are living on the other side of the fence. So instead of rescuing the princess at the end of the dungeon, you’re driving cars and listening to music that’s engaging.” Now, Grand Theft Auto is less a mirror of real life for millions of players than a virtual subsection of life itself. GTA Online follows its own farcical dream logic and is even sillier, more cynical, more ironic, and more moving than the single-player version could ever be. In GTA Online, players are masters of inventing their own stories, a fact Rockstar has slowly cottoned to. It’s a world of pure imagination in which Rockstar itself has had to settle for a coauthor credit.

Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including The Verge, Wired, and Vulture.