Rockstar will still focus on single player games

In an age of online gaming, and despite the success of GTA Online, Rockstar is still firmly committed to the single-player experience.

Despite the last entry in the series releasing back in 2013, we've yet to hear any official information regarding GTA 6, but Rockstar has been hinting towards its existence and this hint is no different.

Rockstar Still Committed To Single-Player Games

GTA Online is a hugely successful property for Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive, with the games' revenue up 28% year over year.

During an earnings call earlier this week, Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick explained that the plan for GTA 5 and Online was to always release as a single-player game and then add multiplayer later, which is what they did.

"The folks at Rockstar Games intended to create a powerful single-player experience and a story-driven experience... and then developed in addition, a massive multiplayer opportunity over the past years."

Even with a shift in the industry towards multiplayer games rather than solely single-player experiences, Take-Two still believe in single-player games,

"There was an argument just a couple of years ago, not around here, not in this shop, but in some of our competitors' offices, that single-player is dead, that it's all about multiplayer. We didn't believe that. I said specifically and publicly that we didn't believe that, our labels don't believe that".

GTA V took the company to new heights, generating $1 billion in revenue in the first three days, and to do it has sold more than 140 million copies, while GTA Online generates over $700 million per year.

Both entities set new sales and activity records in 2020, showing that the GTA brand shows no sign of slowing down.

Despite Online generating over $700 million per year, Rockstar and Take-Two would have to be mad to turn their back on the revenue that core GTA games generate.

In a best-case scenario where every copy was purchased for $60, GTA V would have generated $8.4 billion in revenue to date, that is no small change.

GTA: Wild West edition, or Red Dead Redemption 2 as its also known, has sold over 36 million copies.

While not as popular, it is highly regarded as one of the best single-player experiences to date.

It is highly unlikely that Rockstar will ever stop developing single-player GTA games, even if the Online aspect performs well.

So it is safe to say that GTA 6 will be a single-player game like the previous entries.