Grand Theft Auto VI is going to get glowing reviews and it has almost nothing to do with whether the game is good. The game is too big to fail and not just for Rockstar Games. It is too big for the people whose job is to judge it and too big for the millions of us who have already decided it is the best game ever. Everyone with a stake in GTA 6 has a reason to look past its flaws and that's worrying.
GTA 6 is, by Bloomberg's measure, almost certainly the most expensive game ever made, built over eight years by a studio that rebuilt itself to finish it. Rival publishers cleared out of November rather than stand near it. A bet this large does not just need to succeed. It needs everyone to agree that it did.
Every outlet right now likely runs on Grand Theft Auto traffic and most if not all would not want to risk both clicks and access to a game whose review codes are the most coveted in the business. Reports say that reviewers will get the game weeks early under embargo, which sounds generous but is also a controlled window, the exact setup that lets a consensus form before the wider player base will get a chance to form their own thoughts. The expectation of a near-perfect score is baked in and a review that breaks from it will look like the one that got it wrong.
We are not neutral either. People have waited 13 years for this. They have pre-ordered, bought consoles for it and booked the day off work, with whole businesses closing so staff can play. After an investment like that, admitting that the game is anything but perfect is painful, so most will try to defend its flaws. The people loudest in a game's defense at launch are often the ones who paid the most to be there. It's human nature.
Who has a reason to grade GTA 6 on a curve
Group | Their incentive |
|---|---|
Critics and outlets | Access and GTA traffic they cannot afford to lose |
Players | A 13-year wait and money already spent |
The industry | Needs a hit to prove big games still pay |
Rockstar | A record budget and a reputation to protect |
None of this means the game is bad, only that honest early criticism will be buried by a mountain of positive if forced praises.
History is full of hype outrunning scrutiny. Case in point, Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2020 to strong reviews written almost entirely on high-end PCs, since reviewers got PC code and the last-gen console versions were held back until launch. Then the game met the wider player base and things got ugly real fast. On base consoles, the much-hyped title was a broken mess, so bad that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store and gave refunds and OpenCritic issued a rare warning about the gap between the review conditions and the actual product. The studio later admitted the launch was a mistake, restructuring and effectively changing how it approached video game development because of the backlash.
Even a beloved studio gets grace. Red Dead Redemption 2 scored a 97 on Metacritic, matching Grand Theft Auto V, to near-universal acclaim, yet plenty of players said out loud what the reviews mostly tried to hide, that the controls were clunky, the pacing glacial and the chores tedious. The game is still a masterpiece and that is the point. Real weaknesses can get smoothed over when a studio has earned enough trust.
Rockstar has been forgiven worse, too. Grand Theft Auto Online came out in 2013 barely functional, full of server errors and failed connections. The goodwill around GTA V and Grand Theft Auto IV before it absorbed the damage while the mode went on to print money for a decade.
The pattern is bigger than Rockstar. No Man's Sky and Fallout 76 both arrived with hype and studio goodwill, drew early defenses from fans and then watched the consensus turn against them once everyone had a chance to play the game. Massive pre-release investment and a controlled first look tend to produce the same results every time, a high opening that softens as the honeymoon ends.
To be fair, Rockstar earned its trust the hard way with Red Dead Redemption 2 and it has not coasted since. The two delays were, by the studio's own account, a pursuit of perfection meant to avoid exactly the kind of launch Cyberpunk had. GTA also draws some of the harshest if unfair scrutiny and plenty of outlets would relish being the one to call it if there were something to call.
The simplest reason for a wall of high scores would be that the game is, in fact, that good. All of that is possible. We just won't know if that's the case until weeks after the game comes out.
The worry is not that GTA 6 will be bad, it almost certainly will not be, it is that if it's indeed less than perfect, comes with a heavier monetization push, a story that sags, rough edges on older hardware, the machine around it is built to wave them through. The honest verdict will come weeks later, once the embargo lifts, the full player base arrives and the halo fades.