Ex-Rockstar artist says Sony and Microsoft can't touch Rockstar because they don't care about the games themselves
Saw a GamesRadar quote piece going around from a former Rockstar artist who worked on GTA 6 and RDR2, and it's the kind of take that sounds obvious until you actually think about it. His argument is basically that Sony and Microsoft can't compete with Rockstar on the game-making side because making game products isn't really what they're about. They're platform holders. Their job is selling consoles and services, not pouring eight years into one title.
He also brought up institutional knowledge, calling it absolutely priceless. That part stuck with me more than the console war framing.
People talk about Rockstar's budget like that's the whole story. It's not. The money gets you time and headcount. It doesn't get you a studio that's been iterating on the same open world formula since the PS2 era and still has people around who remember what went wrong on the last one. That's the thing you can't buy. You either kept those people or you didn't.
Sony's first party is genuinely strong, I'm not trying to dunk on them. But the structure is different. A platform holder has to ship a slate. Rockstar ships when it ships, and the parent company just deals with it. Nobody at Sony gets to spend seven years on one game and tell the board to wait.
the part people will argue about
The they do not care about making game products line is going to get quoted out of context all week. I read it as a structural point, not a shot at anybody's passion. Microsoft and Sony care about the ecosystem. Rockstar cares about the disc. Those are different businesses and they produce different games.
Institutional knowledge is absolutely priceless.
That's the quote I'd frame. Every studio that's tried to build a GTA killer has had money. None of them had twenty years of accumulated notes on what a living city is supposed to feel like. It's the least glamorous advantage in the industry and probably the biggest one.
Anyway, nine days out. I'm mostly just glad the discourse has moved on from frame rates for an afternoon.
Source: GamesRadar+ · Curated content.
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