GamesRadar points out Rockstar dropped 10 GTA games in 12 years, and now we wait 13 for one

GamesRadar put up a piece that reframes the whole wait we've been sitting through. The gist: the first ten Grand Theft Auto games came out across a 12 year stretch, and we've now spent 13 years between GTA 5 and GTA 6. One game. Thirteen years.

I had to sit with that for a second. Growing up with this series, the cadence felt relentless. You'd finish one and another was already on the horizon. Now the horizon took over a decade to reach.

What actually changed

The article doesn't pretend there's some scandal here. Games got enormous. Studios got enormous. The gap between a GTA 5 and a GTA 6 is a different kind of production than the gap between, say, the early top-down entries. Rockstar's output slowed to a crawl and the scale of each release ballooned to match.

Still, reading it laid out like that stings a little. We went from a franchise that practically defined annual-ish momentum to one where a single entry is a decade-plus event. The industry around it shifted too, live service, GTA Online, all of it stretching the timeline out.

Does the wait make it better or just longer

I'm not in the camp that says a long wait automatically means a better game. Plenty of delayed stuff lands flat. But there's something to be said for a studio that would rather take the time than ship something half-baked. Whether that patience pays off on November 19 is the only question that matters now.

What I do miss is the rhythm. Getting a new GTA every couple of years meant the series was always part of the conversation. Now it's an event. Which is cool in its own way, but it's a different relationship with the games.

Anyway, the countdown's basically done. Five days out and I'm still not fully processing it. Thirteen years of waiting and it's just about here.

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Source: GamesRadar+ · Curated content.