For the past seven years, the online component of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V has seen a staggering amount of success. The base game hassold over 135 million copiesas of this past August across all platforms, and the average monthly player count on Steam has continued to stay above sixty thousand since November of last year, in addition to all of the regular players on PS4 and Xbox One. This sustained player base can largely be attributed to the regular updates that Rockstar has been providing to the game since its launch, with smaller updates throughout the year and a significant content drop that typically arrives at the end of the year and in the form of a new heist, such as last year’s Diamond Casino heist and 2017’s Doomsday heist. With the exception of the introductory heist that only requires two players, every heist since the feature was introduced back in 2015 has required players to team up with three other partners to complete the setup missions and pull off the grand finale, which if completed successfully, will result in substantial payouts that end up being split among the group. These heists often represent the quickest way to gain large amount of cash in GTA Online, putting solo players at a clear disadvantage if they are unable to play with their friends for various reasons or feel less inclined to team up with random strangers, since many of these missions will often go smoother and result in larger rewards if the whole team communicates with one another.
Last week, Rockstar added the latest heist to GTA Online, the Cayo Perico heist, which, in addition to introducing the first new explorable land mass that has been added to the game post-launch, also represents the first heist without a strict player limit, as it can be completed alone or with up to three other players. With a surprising lack of single player DLC for the campaign likely due to the success of GTA Online, the Cayo Perico heist is the first post-launch content forGTAVthat’s seemingly designed for solo players, even if there may be an expected increase in difficulty for players who attempt to rob an island by themselves. Accessing this new content isn’t as simple as one might expect, however, as the introductory cutscene concludes with the notification that players must purchase the Kosatka submarine, which runs a bit over two million dollars without any of the extra bells and whistles. On top of that, players must also be registered as either a VIP, CEO or MC president, with the first two roles requiring at least an additional one million dollars and the third being the cheapest of the bunch at only two hundred thousand dollars. This means that prior to starting any of the setup missions, players must fork over nearly two and a half million (virtual) dollars just to gain access to this free DLC.
For long-time players, this sum of money may not seem too significant, but for brand new or primarily solo players, this paywall represents a significant barrier to trying out the first new single player content in a Grand Theft Auto game in over seven years. Outside of heists, the average online mission in GTA Online rarely nets the player more than twenty thousand dollars, and often ends up being around half as much, leaving quite the grind ahead for solo players who can’t attempt the heists without recruiting friends or joining randos. Plus, the constant presence of new vehicles, weapons, upgrades and homes to purchase makes it significantly tougher to stay singularly focused on one targeted sum of money, especially for new players who start the game without any of the above, upping the grand total to a conservative three million dollars to, again, just start the heist. Of course, players can always spend real world money on cash cards to boost their virtual bank with minimal effort, but that entirely defeats the purpose of free DLC, since the “Whale Shark” cash card that nets players three and a half million virtual dollars currently goes for fifty bucks. With no mention of any of these obstacles in any of the marketing for the Cayo Perico heist prior to its launch, Rockstar pitching the new set of missions as “playable from start to finish…as a lone operator” seems misleading at best, unintentionally or otherwise.
This lack of willingness to embrace new and solo players is arguably counterintuitive for an online service entering its eighth year of being live and looking for new ways to expand its audience. The most recent expansion for Destiny 2, Beyond Light, launched with Bungie raising the Power Levels of all players to a minimum of 1050, making much of the new content more instantly accessible to new or relapsed players. These types of player-friendly decisions for new and previously-available missions and content are often well received, since it’s tough to argue against more ways to allow players to play more of the content that developers worked so hard on. While there will likely be a sense of pride that comes with being able to easily afford the starting fees for the Cayo Perico heist, the significant size of the paywall is just as likely to come across as off-putting to not only new players but solo players who are already faced with other hurdles to overcome on their way to becoming rich. If Rockstar plans on continuing to court solo players to check out or return to the streets of Los Santos, the developer would be best suited with considering the wide variety of players that could be approaching their newest content drops, regardless of who they are playing with or how much they have played before.
