Yes, current generation, AAA development is incredibly costly. If you look at what it cost them to put out GTA V versus any of the PS2-era games, it’s staggering. Having spoken with several former employees, I’m also under the impression that Rockstar focuses on near-constant crunch, driven by fascist management policies.
For most players, next gen will not be as much of a staggering visual leap as PS2 to PS3, or even that to PS4. But it won’t stop R* from throwing themselves at it at full speed.
The larger problem is looking at the difference between the RDR2 model compared to GTA V. GTAO is the beautiful misstep that worked out for everybody. The publisher made money, the players had fun, everything worked great. They overthought how to implement online for RDR two, and put limits across progress, involved multiple progress tracks and currencies, and basically made it overly confusing. Every online game fucks itself in its own ear when it decides to try and adopt the free-to-play model of multiple currencies.
Watch what happens when GTAVI comes out: it will absolutely be a cluster fuck of over optimized opportunities to fleece the player with micro transactions on multiple levels. R*definitely wants to see the same kind of overwhelming revenue stream they had with GTA Online, but they’ve already shown that they do not understand why it worked.
