A former Rockstar developer said the company canceled standalone DLC for Grand Theft Auto 5 because GTA Online emerged as a “cash cow” soon after launch.
Joe Robineau, who was a Senior Cinematographer and Virtual Cinematographer working in Rockstar’s New York office from 2010 to 2016, spoke to the SanInPlay YouTube channel about why this much-rumored GTA 5 story DLC was dropped after the release of GTA 5 in September 2013.
“A lot of the team went off to make Red Dead Redemption 2 straight away and I got into this other project which was a standalone DLC for GTA that never came out and it was great,” Robineau revealed.
“That was my thing. I was one of the main editors, cinematographers and stage stuff. We split our teams into two. I stayed on GTA Online and then this DLC that Steven Ogg [the actor who played Trevor Philips] was a very important part of.
“And then some of the team overlapped and went to RDR2 early, and then we just did that [flipped motion], because when that game was delayed, we spent so much money… a lot of that stuff ended up going into the later iterations of GTA Online, though, I think. So it’s not like they wasted it.
“It was really, really good. But when GTA Online came out it was such a cash cow and people loved it so much that it was hard to make an argument that standalone DLC would top that. I think looking back now you probably could have done both. But it was a business decision they made. I was a little upset about it.
“That was actually a big part of why I was a little sour at the time. Because I was like you guys WTF? This is freaking awesome. Let’s continue. Let’s get this shit over with.”
IGN has asked Rockstar for comment.
Fans have had snippets of information about GTA 5’s legendary DLC over the years. Indeed, Stephen Ogg talks about it and what it would involve. “Trevor would be undercover, he was working with the feds,” Ogg said. “We did shoot some of that stuff with ‘James Bond Trevor,’ where he’s still kind of insecure, but he’s giving it his all. Then it just disappeared and they never did, they never tracked it down.
GTA data scientists have also found a reference to Trevor with a jetpack, suggesting that the story mode DLC has been repurposed into GTA Online, as Robineau says. In 2018, Rockstar finally introduced GTA Online Doomsday Heist Missions along with the Thruster, a jetpack that is still exclusive to the multiplayer mode to this day.
Rockstar is now focusing on getting GTA 6 ready for a release window in the fall of 2025. There are a number of questions fans have about Rockstar’s plans, including whether GTA 6, unlike GTA 5, will get story DLC. And what happens to the current version of GTA Online when GTA 6 inevitably introduces its own version?
Meanwhile, in the same interview, Robineau discussed the well-documented meltdown and secrecy the Rockstar team endured while working on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. “We’re probably halfway through it [the GTA5 story DLC], and we paused,” he said. “I was also doing GTA Online at the time and I was also doing RDR2. We all were. We worked hard, man. For six or seven years, I worked almost 365 days a year with our team.
For years, Rockstar had a notorious reputation in the video game industry for a brutal crisis in the creation of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead games. However, following the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018 and the shocking stories of the human cost of its development, media reports suggest that changes have been made to the company’s culture to avoid the same thing happening during the development of GTA 6.
Wesley is the UK news editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or privately at wyp100@proton.me.
