Grand Theft Auto V released in 2013 (ten years ago as of September this year) to wide appeal. Two weeks after release, Rockstar North debuted GTA V Online, a variant of the main storyline which allows the player to play alongside other people in publicly joinable servers. The Online mode was incredibly successful, and remains a widely active community to this day. Unfortunately, that diehard community has received yet another disappointment from AAA studio Rockstar.
GTA V has had its fair share of controversies, such as the mission "By The Book". The mission involves the tritagonist, Trevor, waterboarding a victim in order to collect information.
The mission intended to be a commentary about the US government's use of torture and interrogation techniques, but it was received poorly by people, who saw it in poor taste.
There have also been questions raised about the game's predatory monetisation methods, as well as questions of mysoginy towards female characters in the game. As expected, popular titles are never far from controversy, and GTA V is no exception.
On June 8th, Rockstar announced an update to the Online mode in a blog post. It contained a lot of useful improvements, such as the ability to claim all destroyed vehicles at once using Mors Mutual Insurance.
However, the "improvements" quickly turned sour, with the following line:
Lesser-used vehicles will be removed from in-game websites to streamline the browsing experience. These vehicles will be made available via events showrooms, The Lucky Wheel, and other places.
This was concerning, as purchasing cars is an integral part of the gameplay. The aim of the Online mode is (generally) to make enough money to purchase a large car collection, with a large army of supercars to utilise and drive around.
Turns out, 182 cars had been removed from the in-game websites. The list can be found here if you're curious.
Cars are generally bought using the in-game websites, called Legendary Motorsport and Southern San Andreas Super Autos. The removal of these vehicles makes them impossible to obtain as a free-to-play player. You cannot find them on the street, because they're supercars. You can't steal them from players, because the game protects your cars and ensures you always have it if you own it. You can't buy them, because they just removed them from the in-game websites.
There are only two ways to get these removed cars. One is through the casino. Unfortunately, only one random car per day is chosen to be winnable at the Diamond Casino, and it's a casino. The primary purpose of the Casino is to promote the sale of the GTA V Shark Cards, which you can purchase in order to redeem in-game money.
The second way to get one is more sinister. You need to purchase them by going to the Vinewood Car Club. It's a place to buy and sell cars at discount prices. However, it's only available for GTA+ subscribers.
GTA+ is £5.99 a month and is only available for PS5 or Xbox Series X consoles. That's right. PC? Xbox One? PS4? Tough shit. You're not getting those cars.
The reason for this change is rather obvious. Rockstar aims to have $8 billion in profits by 2025, likely as a result of the sequel to GTA V.
It's common for game developers to lock more and more of the base game behind a monthly paywall DLC, lest we forget Skyrim and its horse armour, or the Sims 4's $600 worth of purshable DLC.
This is an unfortunate path that most games are taking, regardless of their price. The worst part is that you can do absolutely nothing about it, since the game's online mode is controlled by Rockstar Games directly. Staying on an older version of the game is impossible, since you can't access Online on those older versions. The only hope we have is that the community creates enough of a social media storm for Rockstar to back down once and for all.
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