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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

If Rockstar ever gets acquired, this will be one of the most expensive deals ever. They routinely sell games in the dozens of millions of units.

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GTA V, mainly thanks to their online offering, has been the 2nd best selling video game of all time, second only to Minecraft... which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion.

Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the game itself.

I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Note that two thirds of the sales of Minecraft occured after 2014[1].

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-26-minecrafts-con...

It makes me happy to see RDR2 do well financially. It's a breathtaking game that's not just about mindless fast-paced action all the time.

And then you shoot a squirrel.

I rarely buy new games at full price, but I bought RDR2 twice: first for the PS4, the on the PC.

Rockstar is owned by Take Two Interactive. TTWO's entire market cap (including Rockstar and 2K) is about half of EA.

EA is much bigger in terms of revenue.

Contrary to popular opinion, Rockstar is actually not a competent game developer.

I'm curious how you measure competence.

Virtually every release Rockstar does sells millions. And from my point of view their games are fun too.

Rockstar makes multiplayer titles, but doesn't have an engine that's capable of dealing with that (leading to an absurd number of bugs and performance problems), and they have no security at all, so their games are only playable on not-yet-cracked consoles. Rockstar even went so far as to include a "finger of god" feature in GTA, which allowed their admins to kick players from and mess with the single player mode, except Rockstar has no security, so mod menu developers figured out how anyone with a menu could use those features to mess with literally anyone's single player. They eventually removed that feature, which as I recall is one of maybe two or three times they fixed a security problem. Previously mod menu users could reset character stats and outright ban other players. It's incredibly broken, even though financially successful, based on ethically questionable marketing of ingame purchases to minors. RDR2 may be beautiful, but performance is bad. RDO runs on the exact same system as GTA, so zero security and unplayable on PC.

I've played most Rockstar titles, but never multiplayer. I don't understand how a lack of security means they're only playable on uncracked consoles. That sounds backwards. I've only ever played them on uncracked consoles. (and it's not just "yet", I just don't crack any consoles I own)

The performance is good enough for any of my purposes. I don't doubt it could be better.

The security thing sounds like a real problem. I didn't know about any of that.

The problem is not what you do with your console or PC, the problem is that multiplayer is P2P and a complete lack of security, anticheat and hardening means that anyone with a mod menu can do practically everything with your game (kick from the game, ban you from in-game features, make the game stuck, crash it, give you bad FPS, flashing or shaking screen, follow you into every session you join and even damage your installation). The only thing that prevents all of this is the platform not being cracked.

How do you define competency? Games sold, aggregate review score, or some other arbitrary metric that you're using to gatekeep on game quality?

My point was that they know how to make games that sell by truckloads. Quality of development is another matter altogether

The people that made GTA great left so that well is going to dry up pretty quick

How do you know? Do you have any source information? I had not read of this before

So more flying motorcycles that shoot rockets? :-) I think they ran out of ideas some time ago unless you count my example.

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