Great news, everyone: we’ve discovered a new A. Two new As, actually, and it’s all thanks to Grand Theft Auto 6, which is so gargantuanly, revoltingly high-budget that neither ‘AAA’ nor ‘AAAA’ are sufficient to describe it. We’re in ‘AAAAA’ territory, gang; new heights of absurdity are here.
That’s per Nigel Lowrie, co-founder of Devolver Digital, in a chat with IGN. In a chat about Silksong and the mad scramble of devs to escape the orbit of its release date, Lowrie mentioned that there is, of course, an upcoming release even bigger, more enormous, more Brobdingnagian than Hornet and her needle: GTA 6.
“There are AAA games and then there’s AAAA games,” said Lowrie, “and I’d argue that Grand Theft Auto is potentially the AAAAA game.” That’s quintuple-A, if they start blurring together at some point for you like they do for me. “It’s just bigger than anything else both in the scope and scale of the game and the kind of cultural impact that it has and the attention it demands.”
Silksong might have loomed over other indie games, but GTA 6 hangs over anything you could conceivably call a videogame. Adam Lieb, CEO of the Gamesight marketing platform, said in the same interview, “I would say that GTA for the last year and a half has been a part of almost every conversation around launch dates I have heard… the scope of that game is so large that it ends up competing with stuff that it otherwise wouldn’t,” he said.
“If you’re a shooter, you don’t care a lot about other things besides shooters… generally if you’re a FPS, that’s the genre you care about. But GTA has been this little bit of a black cloud that looms kind of over everything.”
It’s nuts, frankly. By virtue of its budget—which Rockstar keeps schtum about, but which is no doubt ungodly—and the sheer amount of time it’s been since we last got a game in the series, GTA 6 has attained such an unfathomable density that everyone paying even notional attention to this industry is bracing for its release like it’s a nuclear warhead. My memory might be failing me, but I can’t recall anything so hotly anticipated in my now-several decades of thinking about videogames.
It doesn’t feel very sustainable, does it? Even if Take-Two does tear the band-aid off and charge $80-$90 for the thing, there’s something of the fall of Rome about the whole situation. Like this is a final, cataclysmic explosion before something resets. But perhaps that’s optimistic. Maybe the future is AAAAA. Maybe the future is one long, sustained scream.
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