A legacy.
What is a legacy?
Is it how something is remembered?
How it is appreciated in the years following its debut?
Is it an emotional attachment we have towards things that we find moving or important?
Is it a permanent impact of the trajectory of history?
Regardless, everyone and everything seeks to have a legacy.
To be remembered for the successes and have the failures forgotten.
We share this common goal but very very few ever achieve anything close to it.
This makes it all the more impressive when someone or something comes along and stakes
their flag in the ground of history proclaiming their victory and proving to everyone that
they are worthy of remembrance.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
That’s fair.
What I’m getting at is that every once in a while, we’ll encounter a game that changes
everything.
It redefines what we consider to be the standard within the industry and helps to move the
art form ahead.
It moves all of this ahead not just in the artistic sense but can also do so in the business
sense.
In fact, I would argue that the business side of a game’s impact is more important in
the long run that the way that the game appears to players at launch.
In other words, for a game like Battlefront 2, it may be fun to play for some players,
but the business impact of all of the bad press and the explosive allegations of pay-to-win
and video game gambling had a much more significant impact on gaming as a whole than the gameplay
and nice graphics did.
Of course, Battlefront 2 is an extreme example, but it serves the point.
A game’s legacy is not just defined by its gameplay loop or writing, it’s how these
things intertwine and interact with the rest of the industry that defines for what it will
be remembered.
Now, of course, you don’t get to change the industry with your game unless you do
something either very very right, or very very wrong.
In the case of Battlefront 2, it’s obvious that they screwed up.
However, for many other games, such as The Last of Us, these games can change the way
that society as a whole looks at video games.
And it’s important to note that these things do not happen in a vacuum: you have to have
a great (or truly terrible) game to begin with in order to influence the industry in
such a severe way.
All of this brings us the titular topic of this video, which is to say that one game
in particular has influenced the industry in a way that no other game has in recent
history.
A game that has found its way into over 100 million homes, racked up unbelievable sums
of money for its creators, and completely changed the way that we look at gaming as
a whole, both as consumers and developers.
It’s dark, gritty, and serious all while maintaining a certain levity that makes it
truly unique.
Its handling of adult subject matter made it a defining experience for many of teens
that played it, showing a side of life that they may not have known.
Of course, I’m talking about Wii Sports.
This game defined the late 2000’s and with its intense and highly addicting bowling mini
game made us all lose our collective shi---.
Hehe I’m just kidding.
Of course I’m actually talking about Grand Theft Auto V.
GTA V launched September 17th of 2013 to a level of hyped anticipation unlike almost
anything we’d seen before or that we have seen since.
Now, the single player campaign is fantastic and totally unlike any other game I’ve ever
played.
It really is phenomenal.
In fact, if you’d like to see one of my long form critiques on GTA V, just let me
know in a comment below and subscribe to see it when it comes out.
But the single player isn’t the focus of this video, rather we’re going to talk about
the online.
GTA online launch two weeks after the base game on October 1st 2013.
Initially, it was marred with all sorts of technical issues: things like crashes, excessive
loading screens, lag (sound familiar?).
However, despite all of these issues, players and reviewers alike agreed that the online
mode had a TON of potential.
Why did it have potential?
One word: dynamism.
To really understand this point let’s look at Rockstar’s most recent foray into the
online space.
Red Dead Online.
It’s no mystery the Red Dead Online has struggled immensely since its launch: bugs,
lack of content, an unbalanced economy.
You name it, Red Dead Online has it.
But believe it or not, these issues, while bad, are not the terminal illness that plagues
it.
Rather, that all has to do with the setting.
You see, in GTA Online you have almost limitless opportunities for fun.
You can race fancy cars, fly planes, go mountain biking, get a tattoo, wreak havoc with a monster
truck, design custom races, buy an upscale apartment, skydive and much much more.
Limitless possibilities and endless potential for growth and updates.
Not to mention, these expandable categories are easily monetized.
Especially when contrasted with Red Dead Online.
Needless to say, it’s much easier to sell a two dollar skin for a fancy car you can
use to race and can customize to high heaven than it is to sell a two dollar skin for a
horse.
I mean, that’s literally a meme: Horse Armor.
This is where Rockstar is screwed with Red Dead Online, it was never going to be as variable
or dynamic as GTA Online, and likely never will be.
It just doesn’t work in a cowboy setting the same way as it does in a fictionalized
Los Angeles.
Now, because of this setting and the vast potential that the game had for growth and
improvement, some players stuck with it.
As the months went by, Rockstar added more and more to the game and before anyone realized
it, GTA online had a massive player base.
Then, Rockstar released GTA V on next generation consoles and eventually on PC as well, each
release bringing more and more players into the mix.
This proved to be a winning strategy because as of early 2019, Grand Theft Auto V had become
the single highest grossing entertainment product in history, selling over 100 million
copies and grossing over $6 billion in revenue.
But what impact did this have on the industry?
Surely these things don’t just happen in a vacuum?
Surely other companies noticed Rockstar’s success, grew jealous, and sought to emulate
them.
Oh did they ever.
Prior to GTA Online, there were online games, and online sandboxes, and online micro-transactions,
but nothing had ever grown to gargantuan size the way Rockstar’s attempt had.
Because this was such a revolutionary concept, specifically that there were such huge numbers
of players willing to play the same game for years after release and recurrently spend
money on it, major publishers like Ubisoft, Activision, and EA all took notice.
They started trying to slip this style of monetization into their games whether they
were Assassin’s Creed titles or Battlefront or Call of Duty.
What’s truly amazing is that they did this in such a ham-fisted way.
These attempts at a quick cash in weren’t even good.
They were half-assed micro purchases that were scattered through out the game.
When gamers didn’t respond to it, they took important content out of the game and made
it exclusive to those who forked over some cash.
When this stopped working, they nerfed in game mechanics making it almost impossible
to play the game the way you could years before without spending extra money on top of the
initial $60 investment (just look at NBA 2k18 as an example.
And yes, I know that 2K sports is a subsidiary of 2K games which is a subsidiary of Take
Two Interactive, the same parent company of Rockstar, but this just proves that even Rockstar’s
parent company was scraping the bottom of the barrel to do that very same thing they
had done with GTA V’s online mode.
All of this culminated with the release of Battlefront 2, wherein EA stripped core game
mechanics to their bare minimum in order to encourage gameplay altering boosts to be purchased
from their in game store with real world money.
Players were outraged, news outlets were outraged, YouTubers were outraged, even Disney threw
a fit that their Star Wars license was being used in this way.
In my estimation, this marked a shift.
Companies realized that they would face stark repercussions if they continued in this way
and the majority of them toned down this predatory practice.
EA however is still learning…
But tying all of this back to GTA online: the game did that which no game had done before
and technically speaking, since.
If found a record breaking audience to play it, and recorded more revenue than any other
piece of entertainment in human history.
But it didn’t end there and that certainly isn’t its legacy.
Rather, its legacy is somewhat unfortunate: it ushered in a modern era of microtransactions
and a general approach towards games as a service and not a product.
It inspired, perhaps through no fault of its own, major corporations to start monetizing
their products in predatory ways in order to try and milk customers at the same level
that GTA online has.
But they all missed the operative and most important question in all of this: WHY?
Why were players willing to spend so much money for years and years all the while turning
around and praising Rockstar as a developer?
Because the game itself was great.
If you want to play GTA online, you can do that for hours and hours, or even days and
days on end without the need to pay a dime.
The game is so good and fun by itself that players find themselves wanting to buy cosmetics
or shark cards just so that they can thank Rockstar.
It’s the simplest but apparently the most difficult to grasp takeaway from GTA V: make
a good game and people will buy it.
Make an online game fun and people will play.
Spoil your players and they’ll spoil you.
Regardless, there is one thing that I can say with absolute confidence and that is that:
Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online Changed Gaming Forever…