Rockstar Games continues its rivalry with Bethesda to see which company can re-release a flagship game the most times. Rockstar gets a leg up today with the announcement that Grand Theft Auto V will be coming to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
This announcement comes not as a standalone piece of news, but buried under updates for the online components of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II. It’s a real indicator of Rockstar’s priorities when news about GTA V is seemingly far less important than the multiplayer cash cows of GTA Online and Red Dead Online.
That full announcement can be found here but the important part about the news ports, located right at the bottom, is as follows:
The expanded and enhanced versions of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online are arriving on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S with new features and more, on November 11th, 2021. As an added bonus — this summer’s updates to GTA Online will include special benefits for players to take advantage of in these expanded and enhanced versions when they drop. Plus, in honor of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the genre defining Grand Theft Auto III, we’ll have even more fun surprises to share — including some specifically for GTA Online players.
This is immediately followed by talk of more online-related content. Those on PlayStation 5 will be able to play GTA Online for free for the first three months after launch.
Rockstar has been trying to lower the barrier to entry for the online components of their games for a while, such as Red Dead Online becoming a standalone game last year that was heavily discounted for a few months after launch.
With all this in mind do we really need ports like this when both next gen consoles support backwards compatibility? That question will be answered at a later stage as Rockstar promises more news about the ports in the future. There will have to be some massive benefits here to entice players to spend money on a game that came out in 2013.
That being said, hey Rockstar, we can do your job for you. Just take a lot of the multiplayer-only content like the vehicles and missions in GTA Online and make it available in the singleplayer of GTA V. It’s that simple. We know the upper management would faint at the very thought of doing this in fear of missing out on sales of Shark Cards or whatever BS digital currency you peddle, but think of how many singleplayer rubes you’d be able to sell the game to again just by recycling work that’s already been done.
Now we wait to see when Bethesda will announce a new port for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
