{"id":88849,"date":"2026-09-03T12:12:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=88849"},"modified":"2026-09-03T13:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T17:37:14","slug":"we-were-all-positive-it-was-going-to-fail-rockstar-devs-thought-gta-online-would-flop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=88849","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;We Were All Positive It Was Going to Fail&#8217;: Rockstar Devs Thought GTA Online Would Flop"},"content":{"rendered":"<section data-transform=\"mobile-ad-break\">\n<p>A former Rockstar Games developer has revealed that the team thought <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ign.com\/games\/grand-theft-auto-online\">GTA Online<\/a> was going to fail before it launched.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eldorado.gg\/blog\/grand-theft-auto-en\/matt-freedman-exclusive-gta-interview\/\">Eldorado<\/a>, ex-Rockstar Games developer Matt Freedman looked back on the success of GTA 5 and attributed a lot of it to GTA Online. He noted that a lot of investors seek a GTA Online-level success nowadays, but said it was treated as an &#8220;afterthought&#8221; during its initial development.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When we were working on GTA Online, it was an afterthought,&#8221; said Freedman. &#8220;We were all positive it was going to fail. Everyone thought this thing was going to fail. I remember QA testers coming up to me [and saying], &#8216;We\u2019ve got four hours of content for online mode. To do everything in GTA Online, it\u2019s four hours,&#8217; or it was something like that. It was really short, and they\u2019re like: \u2018We are in so much trouble,&#8217; and we\u2019re all sitting there going, &#8216;Let\u2019s see what happens. We\u2019re going to do our best job anyways.&#8217; And then it took off, and then there was, to Rockstar\u2019s credit, a fast follow with as much content as possible and [it] just kind of keep it going. And now it\u2019s become this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A former Rockstar Games developer has revealed that the team thought GTA Online was going to fail before it launched. In an interview with Eldorado, ex-Rockstar Games developer Matt Freedman looked back on the success of GTA 5 and attributed a lot of it to GTA Online. He noted that a lot of investors seek&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":194,"featured_media":88851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-external"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88849"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88849"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88853,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88849\/revisions\/88853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/88851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}