Console players spend a whole lot more in GTA Online than PC players do. Probably because PC players mod more.

It’s guns, cars, and cosmetics, of which there will be plenty in $80 version. The one part that’s hard to evaluate is that the larger edition has more “businesses”. An educated guess is that it’s the real estate minigame from Vice City, and there are a few properties that are only in the more expensive edition, but that’s only a guess. It doesn’t sound like whole storylines are locked off.

For GTA5, the single player works on Linux even though their anti cheat prevents playing the multiplayer.

From the FAQ on the PlayStation store page:

Q: Does Grand Theft Auto VI have any multiplayer modes or features?

A: Grand Theft Auto VI is a single-player experience.

Meaning that on its release date, there will be no multiplayer. We all know the mulitplayer is coming, whether it’s added later (like it was to GTA5 or RDR2) or if it’s a separate item in the store. Taking an educated guess, it’s probably just going to be added on, so that it can leverage the same game installation.

Oh, I went with John Auto because whenever there’s a Street Fighter trailer with the generic create-a-fighter for World Tour mode, people call that guy John Street Fighter. We definitely haven’t seen create-a-characters up to this point.

Since at least GTA4, Rockstar has nearly cornered the market on crime stories like you’d find in Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorcese, Guy Ritchie, or Michael Mann movies. The appeal is playing out an action game that would feel like one of those crime stories.

I very strongly believe the wording is just there to let you know that GTA Online won’t be available at launch, much like with RDR2 and GTAV. I’m actually surprised so many people are reading it any other way.

There’s a big difference between “this cut-scene shows something cooler than what I can do when I’m in control” and “extrapolating the word ‘experience’ out to mean that anything single player is going to be half-assed”.

The chances get significantly higher when the console player base is smaller and trending down. Investors want to see the biggest entertainment launch in history every time, which is doable when you’re reaching a larger addressable market. The other headwind they’re facing right now is that people on the fence for a PS5 are maybe less inclined to buy one just for GTA now that it’s gotten significant price hikes. Someone impatient who may have been willing to double dip is probably less so.

GTA6 is still going to do gangbusters with exactly this strategy, but the market is changing, and it could affect how things play out in the future.

I think canonically his name ended up being Claude? But no, I mean the way GTA Online does its missions is that every NPC will talk to you, but your character is silent. And no create-a-character system outputs characters that look as good as the protagonists of GTA 6, where they have human actors as the reference models and performance capture.

Sure, but we know exactly who the protagonists are. It’s the Bonnie and Clyde dynamic. It’s a single player campaign. This isn’t a guess; we know this. Even if they hadn’t said this publicly, we knew this from leaks from years ago.

Never say never. The console landscape has changed dramatically since both of those games came out. PC took a lot of market share, and the console install base at the time of GTA V’s release was way higher than it is now.

Plenty of folks in their right mind are buying AAA games at launch. Being in the zeitgeist, and talking with other folks when they also experienced the same creative work, has value. It’s the same reason folks see movies in the theater instead of waiting for streaming or a boxed release.

I see no reason to believe that the “single player experience” is anything other the campaign you’d expect out of a new Grand Theft Auto.

Where are you getting that it’s an offshoot of the mulitplayer? We’ve seen the cinematic trailers and such by now. There are written characters, and you’re not just playing as the create-a-character “John Auto”. I think they’re just saying it’s a single player experience so that people looking for GTA Online know that it won’t be there at launch.

Contrary to what the industry is hoping, this will not allow other games to sell at $80. Customers are already having a hard time justifying $70.

Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper

No, it doesn’t even get that far.

Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.

A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.

But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.

And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.

You would price out the closest equivalent in price and performance, if you wanted to make an honest comparison, and plenty of people have specced out builds like that, with the differences between the two noted. And for as “ancient” as the tech in the Steam Machine is, it’s still better than what 70% of Steam users are running. Considering that the most popular games by a wide margin on any modern platform right now are all 10+ years old, that’s not much of a surprise.

The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.