Will ‘GTA V’ Ever Get A Story DLC?
GTA V speculation has shifted into overdrive with the highly anticipated release of the DLC four-pack this September. Heavyweight GTA V tipsters like MrBossFTW, TezFunz, and Mr. Funmw2 have released tweets and videos suggesting that the new DLC will come sometime in the second week of September. This speculation is based on the creation of a folder on GTA V’s servers entitled “DLCPacks4.” It seems that the discovery of this folder confirms what an “anonymous source” told Mr. Funmw2 about the release date.
The International Business Times is reporting that “gender changes” will be available upon request, while the Express is rather more restrained, contenting themselves with breaking down the features of the new Rockstar editor package and the few other aspects of the lease that can be considered “confirmed.” Some smaller publications have even reannounced the release of the GTA V story DLC, but a little more checking reveals that they are using the same sources that started the last batch of rumors. But what we basically have is a looping roundup of MrBossFTW’s self-declared guesses on what kind of cars GTA V “might have” in the future and Funmw2’s enigmatic announcements. And on the Rockstar newswire? There’s a story on a bike race and a months old announcement about Ill Gotten Gains II.
Back in June, the latest round of rumors about a new story DLC began circling, and over the past few months, they have ebbed and flowed with incidents like the Straight Outta Compton posts from some of GTA V’s voice actors. The story DLC story has been broken several times, on one occasion so convincingly that a Wikipedia page describing its probable content was created. It came down pretty quickly.
The persistence of these rumors might indicate to some that there is something out there in the ether, that there’s no smoke without fire. But we have to ask ourselves how much of this is just confirmation bias? How much of our belief that a story DLC is coming is based on how much we love GTA V? Because the truth of the matter is that the more time passes from the initial release, the less likely it is that Rockstar is going to spend time and money on developing more GTA V single player story content. Paul Tassi over at Forbes made the argument back in June that not producing a story DLC was like “leaving money on the table.” He pointed out that the gaming population is bound, eventually, to move on, so waiting years to produce a GTA V continuation was tantamount to throwing away millions of dollars.
When Rockstar did a census back in 2014, they announced that 33.8 million people around the world had played GTA Online. This is an impressive number and could be seen as ample reason for Rockstar to be relaxed about market uptake for new GTA V content. And in the meantime, focusing GTA V online content in a community this big must be financially very rewarding. But the nature of gaming, and the fact of the next generation of consoles being likely to produce some jaw-dropping new titles very soon makes it unreasonable to expect that this number is going to do anything but get smaller. Added to this is the fact that, apart from some indiscreet comments by Take-Two’s CEO, later denied, there has been no firm promise of a story DLC at any time. No announcement and the clock continuing to tick makes it very hard not to conclude that it’s not coming.
Which makes us sad.
What we have to hope is that Rockstar is simply trying to hit us with a massive surprise. That they know the size of their GTA V audience and they don’t want to announce because of their consistent history of delayed releases. Perhaps they’re afraid of Arkham Knight style outrage and want to underpromise and overdeliver when it comes to GTA V. I really hope that this is what’s happening because otherwise I can see no good reason to believe that a GTA V story DLC is even being contemplated.
[Picture Via Rockstar]
