Rockstar Games recently announced that its best selling title, Grand Theft Auto 5, will be launching on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2021. When this happens, the game will have been ported to platforms spanning three generations of consoles, as well as PC.
However, many current fans don't intend to triple-dip.
Following the announcement, we were curious about how many of our readers — the majority of whom are active players — plan to purchase the game again when the next-gen ports are released, and the numbers are telling.
As you can see, fans were asked "If you own GTA 5 already AND will be upgrading your console to the PS5 or Xbox Series X, do you plan on buying GTA 5 again for your new system?" With the poll now ended, just 28% of voters that own GTA 5 already said that they will definitely buy the game again in 2021.
GTA 5 was first launched on Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2013, and has since expanded to the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. The first two consoles have even been dropped from content support since then, with only the platforms sporting stronger hardware getting ongoing DLC.
The topic of the game's immense, unprecedented success is one we have delved into several times here at GTABOOM, due to how multifaceted a situation it is.
Being released and re-released on so many platforms at different times was a huge boon to sales figures, and back when the game made the upgrade to PS4 and Xbox One, many players were returning from the earlier versions, having bought the game twice. A smaller but still significant number bought it again on PC.
At the same time, every new release also bolstered the player numbers with entirely new fans who didn't own the game before on other systems. So, for whom is the latest port mainly made for?
It is pretty clear that the intended audience will be completely new players — or perhaps those who enjoyed GTA 5 on PS3 and Xbox 360 but didn't upgrade — instead of calling existing fans back for a second, third, or in some rare cases, fourth round.
The low number of people planning to buy GTA 5 again isn't at all surprising for one specific reason — backwards compatibility. The Xbox Series X is confirmed to be completely backwards compatible, and while the specifics of backwards compatibility on PS5 are still murky, even the most conservative estimates indicate GTA 5 will be.
This means that if you own the game on either current generation console, and upgrade your system, you don't even need to buy the new port to play the game on the next-gen consoles. We're guessing playing a backwards compatible PS4 version on a PS5 system won't grant you the next-gen improvements, but you'll still get the same experience you're enjoying now.
