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A former Rockstar animator who worked on Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 has weighed in on why the GTA 6 developer focuses on releasing new games for console first and then PC second.
After GTA 6 was officially revealed but before the first trailer drop, some wondered if Rockstar might buck the trend of releasing a new game on consoles and then on PC a year or more later. The developer did not.
The news hasn't gone down well in some corners of the Rockstar fandom, so former Rockstar animator Mike York has weighed in to shed some light on what goes on behind closed doors. While the long wait for a PC release typically stems from the team's desire to release something that's the best version of itself, it's also true that priorities lie with getting something out on the platform it sells best on.
"Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have; it sold more copies than any other console for the most part; everybody is playing PlayStation."
York goes on to explain that the popularity incentive leads developers to ensure the port of the dominant platform works really well. In this case, that's PlayStation, though Xbox will still be worked on. Looking back to his time working on GTA 5, he says Rockstar concentrated on both PS3 and Xbox at the same time but was "mainly pushing the PS3 to the limit because the PS3 was kind of better hardware at the time to use memory and different things."
That's not to say that a PC version of even GTA 5 didn't exist at that point in development. York says that a PC port was basically in the background running the other two versions and building them.
"There's always a PC version of the game, but it's not quite polished. It's just feeding the other games and making them work," he says.
Attention naturally turns to that PC port when the console versions have shipped and are working as intended. That said, once a game is out, the question is rarely about simply polishing it up for a new platform, but whether it can be taken to the next level - and the answer is typically 'yes'.
"When the developer goes into the PC port part of the process, what they're going to do is that they now have new ideas to push things," York explains. "For instance, they might go into a scene and go, 'Oh, we have it on PC now, we have a little bit more memory, we can add some fog into here like we always wanted to, but it was too much for the console.' They can do a lot of different things like adding in more characters, they can populate better foliage."
"Because the PC hardware, depending on what PC you have, is going to be able to run it better. So they're going to optimize it for the best PC parts that are available today."
York also says it's important to know that a PC port can take a while because each PC is unique and comes with different components, whereas each console is built the same.
"When it comes to a PC, every single person has a different PC, they're running it differently, they have different hardware, different kinds of CPUs, and GPUs," he says. "The memory usage and different things the game is doing in the background can sometimes hit a fail and mess up during different configurations. That's what it boils down to. They need to test the game more on PC than they would on an Xbox or a PlayStation. You already have to test the game a ton in order to get it to work, so a PC version is even harder."
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