Rockstar Just Quietly Retracted Its Overzealous GTA 6 Launch Claim, But Why?
Yesterday, eager eyes noticed that Rockstar Games had made a job listing for Lead Software Engineer, claiming within that Grand Theft Auto 6 would be "the largest game launch in history"— but just a day later, the text within that job listing has changed, omitting the entire paragraph and combining the surrounding two in its stead. This struck us as particularly interesting, since it means that not only did Rockstar notice accounts like @TheGTABase drawing attention to this discovery on Twitter, but felt the need to quietly remove that claim from the posting in question, as if somehow doubting the veracity of it. Below, we've embedded a screenshot of the original posting, viewable for yourself on Archive.org, which you can compare to the live version on Rockstar's site.
Now, to anyone paying attention, the removal of this claim is surprisingly contentious. After all, Grand Theft Auto as a franchise is known to sell gangbusters, and the last major GTA game, Grand Theft Auto V, sold hundreds of millions of copies across its original PS360 launch and subsequent remasters for PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC. It is the second-best-selling video game of all time with current lifetime sales estimated to be higher than 215 million. Grand Theft Auto VI has an even larger development budget, even more development time, and is expected to reach similar-if-not-higher numbers in today's larger console gaming market. And that's saying nothing of the eventual GTA 6 PC port, which may release closer to the console version than before since modern console architectures are much closer to PCs than PS3 and 360 were.
So, why would Rockstar Games choose to remove its audacious wording from the job listing? The answer seems to be "Because you noticed it". But considering the sheer success of Grand Theft Auto V, other Rockstar games, as well as Rockstar's high commitment to huge, immersive open worlds with cutting-edge graphical fidelity, we'd be seriously surprised for the game to be anything but the highest-selling game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles alike. Industry analysts also believe it will be the most high-budget game of all time.
