Sure, Grand Theft Auto has always been about the shooting. The car chases. The seedy criminal activity. But it’s also about looking fly as fuck while you do it. Driving around the city in expensive, tricked-out cars. Nipping to the barbershop for a nicer haircut as you climb the criminal ranks. Spending your eventual riches on parodied designer clothing and jewellery. Hitting that level of wealth where you go from looking expensive and put-together to expensive and downright ugly.
I never expect to have to cough up too much of my own real-life finances to do that, but if GTA 6’s Ultimate Edition is anything to go by, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing. Rockstar’s calling it the game’s ultimate edition, sure, but I can’t help but feel like this is what the developer actually wants the standard version to be, while its $80 version is feeling distinctly Lite Edition.
Now Deluxe/Ultimate/Premium/Insert Fancy Upgrade Term Here cosmetic exclusives are not new to videogames, and preorder bonuses have become a plague on the industry. But usually it’s the odd outfit here or cosmetic pack there. Rockstar, however, is going one step further by putting entire stores on the map of Leonida that won’t be accessible unless you cough up the $20 upgrade, and quite frankly that’s where I have to draw the line.
As far as we know, there are currently five stores that are paywalled: Two mod shops, a clothing store, a salon, and a tattoo parlour. All offering customisation options that, at this point, I deem an integral part of this series’ identity. It feels criminal that a game touting itself as the “most immersive GTA experience yet” has the very real potential to constantly pull me out of that immersion by reminding me that I’ve yet to spend an extra 20 bones any time I get within the vicinity of these ‘premium’ stores.
Who knows if we’ll even be able to enter any of these stores with our paltry, peasant $80 purchase? Will the doors be locked entirely, prompting me to open the store page and fork out for the upgrade? Will I be able to enter, but told that I’m not quite elite enough to get a new paint job—of either the vehicular or manicure variety? There’s no winning strategy here besides paying the full, big hundo. And even then, I still feel like I’m losing.
To me, it’s a bad sign of what’s to come. Not just for GTA, but for videogames. Locking off little pockets of the map for only the biggest spenders does not feel good, especially when it’s for a singleplayer game. It doesn’t even seem to be ending at cosmetics, either—the pre-order page also lists “action” as something reserved for the Ultimate Edition buyers.
What that looks like isn’t totally clear right now—at the very least, it seems to be referring to a series of side missions called PTT Youngin$ Compound and Scores, where you’ll raid this gang’s store for contraband and special items. This stuff used to be in the game for no additional cost, guys! Come on, now.
The worst part is, this is going to work. The FOMO of shuttered stores and exclusive cars will entice a whole bunch of people to settle on the more expensive version. And quite frankly, I can’t blame them. But I also wish Rockstar had simply folded all of this in and offered a flat $100 videogame. That probably would’ve pissed people off too, but I’d prefer this over paywalling stuff that’s been a part of the series for years and acting like it’s some kind of cool bonus. Instead, the whole thing comes off as mighty greedy.
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