The wait for GTA 6 on PC lasting past this November’s been a foregone conclusion for a while now, but if you’re interested in a bit of developer perspective as to why Rockstar opt to do things that way, a former producer at the company’s offered some. Essentially, it’s a matter of it being less of a headache to scale up after initially getting a game working on hardware with stricter limitations than it would be to strip back an all-singing, all-dancing PC port for consoles.
Speaking to YouTuber Kiwi Talkz, former Rockstar producer John Ricchio discussed how the studio approached bringing GTA 5 and the original Red Dead Redemption to different platforms. For context, Ricchio left Rockstar in 2014 following a decade or so stint there, having since worked on Amazon’s Lumberyard engine, an unreleased version of Minecraft-like Hytale, and for Riot Games on fighter 2XKO. As such, his insight on Rockstar’s specific porting modus operandi’s not as current as someone who’s just left the company might be able to provide, but it’s still useful.
Acknowledging that developing for PC first and then porting over is an option some developers like, Ricchio said that as far as he’s aware it’s “less fashionable now”. “It just causes so [many] problems down at the end [of development],” he explained. “So you’re much better off starting with the constraints. Every once in a while, there’ll be advanced features that you can take advantage of later, that you can decide to plan for or not. But yeah, it’s always better to start with the constraints and then extend because shrinking is a lot harder than extending.”
Ricchio went on to talk about the original Red Dead Redemption, which famously took ages to get a proper PC port, revealing that one was actually worked on back in the day. “We actually got a PC build running very early, just to see how how far would it take, and most of the time it’s not even that we don’t care about PC. It was just like, ‘is it worth spending time getting a PC port [of Red Dead Redemption going versus working on GTA 5’? It’s always those conversations.”
While the producer acknowledged that the gap between consoles and PCs in terms of tech limitations has closed, making ports a less tricky proposition in theory compared to the past, the question of whether it’s more useful to be working on something else remains. “There has to be enough of a business reason to do some of those ports,” Ricchio said. “Or the lift has to be so light that it’s like, ‘Oh, it’ll be super easy to do’. It’s rarely super light. There’s always something that you’ve got to do.”
On the plus side, the wait might help those of us PC folks – at least those who aren’t potentially put off by Rockstar’s current legal battle against former staff who’ve accused them of union busting – save some money on the gubbins locked behind GTA 6’s ultimate edition.
