[Rockstar Leak] Ambitious intentions in GTA Online and production of Red Dead Redemption 2 led to the cancellation of multiple Rockstar games

[John Elden Ring]

Yesterday, on the night of Christmas Eve (December 24), the source code for Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V was leaked onto the internet.

Among the various pieces of information found in the code, there was an unplayable build of GTA 6, information about 8 canceled DLCs for GTA V, one of which was an expansion that would bring Liberty City to the game, as well as information about the canceled Agent, and even Bully II.

According to sources in 2014 Leslie Benzies (One of the most important producers at Rockstar) and the Housers got into a huge disagreement due to Leslie’s desire to focus more on Online titles solely over Single-Player for the future of Rockstar. Proof of this is what Benzies is currently making, an online Fortnite-esque “platform” titled Everywhere.This disagreement reached a breaking point resulting in Leslie Benzies leaving the company in mid-2014, Alongside him, a large number of the developers who were working on GTA 5’s Expansions left the company alongside him, pausing the work on the DLCs indefinitely as Rockstar got to hiring new devs and training them to work with RAGE.During this, the GTAO team was making great progress on their work and seeing huge success so Rockstar decided to lend them more resources to build out GTAO which ultimately paid off hugely. By late 2015 the dream of a GTA 5 story expansions had died as the Housers decided to shift all their focus to Red Dead Redemption 2, By 2016 a Liberty City expansion to GTA 5/GTAO had been prototyped but ultimately also cancelled as RDR2 kept growing in scale, adding in New Austin very late in development and expanding the game's insane scope even further, the scope of RDR2 got so large that every single Rockstar studio fully dedicated themselves to RDR2, placing Bully 2 and all other ideas on ice until further notice.Ultimately, RDR2 became by far Rockstar's largest ever title in sheer scale and detail, GTAO made sure Rockstar was secure financially during this time which allowed them to fully focus on one singular title over releasing multiple smaller titles so in that way, yes GTAO affected how Rockstar makes games.

In addition to Bully II, an unannounced project by Rockstar San Diego was also found in the GTA V source code files, and it is none other than Midnight Club 5. We don't know during what period the studio was developing the project, especially considering the San Diego studio's total focus on the Red Dead series, so it is possible to state that the project was also canceled during the middle of 2010-2014.

 

[Johnic]

That nasty money grab killed so many potentially great projects. It can't die soon enough, never to repeat again.