I’m still fondly remembering GTA 4 as a game that released as a complete product, with DLCs that gave you another games worth of content. And the multiplayer had no monetization and was just a nice, big sandbox for you and your friends (and possibly other, random people if you wanted).

GTAV was their first time monetizing the fuck out of GTA, and I am still pissed off about the additions to multiplayer that have not made it to singleplayer. Between this experience and the union busting, I’m never paying for 6; I might pirate it if the singleplayer isn’t enshittified for the sake of milking whales but frankly they’ve already done it to the multiplayer and nothing is sacred anymore, so I fully expect a shitty singleplayer experience as well. This news only further cements that expectation – if they’re whipping the devs this hard, imagine how much they’re gonna squeeze the players. And I suspect that divide between singleplayer, included-in-your-purchase-content and what gets added to multiplayer after launch will only continue to grow larger the longer the game is updated if they do it the same way as 5 – so I’m aiming to get my first (and likely only) playthrough in soon after launch, before that gaping maw of missing content is too upsetting to ignore. Hopefully it’s cracked relatively quickly, I expect it will be.