Fans of the Grand Theft Auto game series have been put on an emotional rollercoaster for several days now, with news of delays and, apparently, a new trailer. Diehard fans of the game series are full of hope regardless of the disappointment, but others, including myself, are expressing great doubt in Rockstar Games’ and Take-Two’s commitment to meeting the deadline…at all.
To be frank, as the title says, I think fans will be lucky if the game is ever made, or if it is, it’s going to be a glitchy mess like another highly hyped up game that crashed and burned on its release COUGH!-COUGH!CyberpunkCOUGH!-COUGH! What’s not helping the panic PR campaign by Rockstar and Take-Two was the recent firing of workers from Rockstar North, the UK branch of Rockstar Games.
Multiple sources/articles have different numbers, but around 30-40+ programmers have been fired, depending on who you ask. Why were they all let go? If you ask RockStar and Take-Two, it’s for “Gross misconduct” for sharing company information. But if you ask the workers who are now protesting outside the offices, it was over workers at these companies talking privetly about organizing a union, in other words, Union Busting, which is illeagal in the United States, I’ll admit I’m not 100% sure about the laws in the UK when it comes to that (I’m open to learning about it!).
If I had to venture a guess, it looked like workers at Rockstar (North) saw the writing on the wall that they were in for a repeat of what happened during the development of Red Dead Redemption 2. A quick recap of what happened there: programmers worked hours of overtime without being paid, and several were made to work from home outside working hours, again, without pay. So organizing a union this time around sounds warranted, but apparently not to Strauss Zelnick and Sam Houser, CEOs of Take-Two and Rockstar Games.
Given the current climate and attitude globally towards corporations and million/billion-dollar-earning CEOs, I honestly think fans will be lucky if GTA6 will even be completed. With eyes on the picket lines outside of Rockstar North, I think you’ll soon see them outside of Rockstar as well. If that happens, one of three things will happen: GTA6 enters development Hell, GTA6 will be released eventually, but the hype was not worth it, or GTA6 is released at an even later date as programmers are allowed to unionize and work. I highly doubt the third one will happen, though.
