I just think that if you’re going to call something a grift, it should actually be one, because words have meaning. We can call it all sorts of other things. “Predatory” is a good one. I myself called it “shitty”. That’s not arguing in favor of a giant corporation. You can’t just pick your favorite negative descriptor when it doesn’t apply.
Are you unaware that there’s a component of GTA 6 besides GTA online? Even in the online mode, they’re milking gamers for weak content using regular gambling. A grift would be like a carnival game that appears winnable but actually never is. For your gambling money, you do get “stuff” in GTA 6, even if you or I would consider it a poor value. I don’t know why a shitty online mode would make me want to play a good crime story single player mode less, but the mere existence of the single player mode easily makes it more than “just” that.
GTA is a crime story video game. “Dishonest gambling” doesn’t mean “gambling I don’t like”. A science-based dragon MMO Kickstarter is a grift. GTA 6 is a video game.
It’s hard to consider an 81 on OpenCritic to be a trainwreck. People tend to buy games that review well, especially when it’s a co-op shooter with basically no competition.
The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.
I think these online subscriptions are proving to be a major factor in why there’s been a migration of audiences from consoles to PC. People are seemingly running the long-term calculus in their heads and realizing PC is cheaper at a certain threshold.
That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.