Just Cause Creator Says Competing With GTA 6 Is "Impossible"

Christofer Sundberg, the co-founder of Avalanche Studios and the creative director behind the Just Cause series and Mad Max, knows better than most not to compete with Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto. This is why, ahead of his new studio, Liquid Words, releasing a game on April 8, he wants to set the record straight.

"There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else," Sundberg told PC Gamer. "And so I see Samson as being like back in the day when action movies were 90 minutes long, not over two hours. I keep on going back to watching Die Hard and Ronin and First Blood and Rambo. I think there's a space for us there, and that's where I want to end up."

In short, what Sundberg is saying is that he wants people to stop comparing his upcoming game to GTA. It isn't trying to compete. It's trying to ride the wave.

After decades of trying, the open-world crime genre is now effectively a one-franchise monopoly. Saints Row is dead, Driver is dead, Sleeping Dogs never got a sequel, and the Watch Dogs series is in limbo. There is Rockstar, and then there is everybody else, and everybody else has either shut down, pivoted, or stopped trying, in no fault of their own.

So, when Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19, 2026, the cost of competing with a $3 billion game built by a studio with effectively unlimited resources is so prohibitive that nobody can justify trying, so Sunberg is doing the next best thing by hoping on its coat tails.

I have a huge respect for Rockstar and what they've done to the industry. Every time a GTA game releases, it's just Christmas for everyone.

He also called competing with GTA "impossible."

Unlike other analysts who've called GTA 6 a meteor and iceberg, Sunberg's words show that the upcoming title could potentially be the rising tide that the video game industry desperately needs, that lifts all the boats after a historically down market last year following its delay, especially in the open-world crime genre.

Millions of people who buy GTA 6 on November 19 will play it intensely for weeks or months and then, inevitably, want something else in the same vein. The question is whether anything will exist to meet that demand.

Saints Row will not be there. Watch Dogs will not be there. Sleeping Dogs will not be there. The genre has been so thoroughly vacated by every studio that is not Rockstar that the adjacent market, the games people play between GTA sessions, is effectively empty.

Sundberg is positioning Samson to fill exactly that gap. It's the Die Hard to GTA 6's Lord of the Rings. It is a modest pitch, but it is also an honest one, and in a genre where every game that tries to be the next GTA gets crushed under the weight of that comparison, honesty about what you are and what you are not might be the smartest survival strategy there is.

Samson: A Tyndalston Story launches on PC on April 8, 2026, seven months before GTA 6. Whether it finds an audience will depend on whether Sundberg is right that people want a lean, focused crime game to play alongside whatever Rockstar has to offer.

Then again, given the complete absence of anything else in the genre, he might just be right to bet on his $25 game.