Remember when Adin Ross said that he's looking forward to making money off of Grand Theft Auto 6 with his crypto-centric idea? Well, fast forward to today, and the multi-millionaire Kick streamer has another hot take. Ross recently asked on a live stream, “What more can they (Rockstar Games) do then what GTA 5 role play doesn’t have?”
If we're being honest, it's a wild question to ask about the most hyped major game release of the past... well, more than a decade. At the same time, you have to admit that it does make sense, especially when you consider the fact that Grand Theft Auto V has evolved into something that probably even Rockstar Games themselves never thought would happen.
After limping months into its launch, Grand Theft Auto Online has since become an entire ecosystem with jobs, economies, factions, custom interiors, scripted systems, and communities that basically treat Los Santos like a second life. These days, entire social media feeds are filled with highlights, mod showcases, and clips from RP servers.
Because of the RP community, GTA Online has normalized real "careers" with actual progression and server-wide consequences, deep player-run economies that feel more like an MMO than a sandbox, custom interiors everywhere, massive server-specific systems, and a constant stream of new content that creators update regularly.
However, Rockstar hasn’t promised any of that for GTA 6 yet. So when a big streamer says, “What are we even waiting for?” what they’re really saying is: “What does Rockstar deliver that the community can’t patch in?”
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The thing is, this take seriously undersells what Rockstar has done and been doing in recent years. Rockstar is no longer competing with RP, even though Take-Two Interactive will still occasionally sends in lawyers against certain content. We’ve already seen Rockstar publicly lean into the RP conversation with support around major RP projects like NoPixel’s next phase and after acquiring Cfx.re two years ago, it launched an official storefront for mods tied into the FiveM/RedM ecosystem.
So while RP players are right to watch this development closely, it's wrong to think of Rockstar as the enemy. If anything, Rockstar is positioning itself to provide "official support" for mods in GTA 6, complete with better tools and stability, which was actually heavily rumored before to the point that one content creator believes that this spells the end for numbered Grand Theft Auto installments as we know them.
However even if, for some reason, Rockstar doesn't turn GTA 6 into an RP player's dream, there are still several things that a modded 2013 title can't fully replicate. For example, a brand-new world built for current-gen hardware. Have you seen how beautiful Leonida and Vice City look in the first trailer and the second trailer? The game will only look better on the PS5 Pro and, of course, when it eventually launches on the PC.
Then there's the possibility of officially supported content pipelines, especially if Rockstar expands on what it's doing already with Cfx. Besides, what can the modding community do against the simple fact that GTA 6 is the next shiny object that the video game industry is currently already fixated on to the point that it crashed following its latest delay?
None of that guarantees GTA 6 will be “better” than RP. It just means the comparison isn’t as clean as “mods already did it.”
Of course, Adin Ross isn't entirely wrong to be skeptical. The community has set an incredibly high bar to clear, and 13 years is a long time to build up expectations. If Rockstar delivers a vanilla experience that feels restrictive compared to what we have now, players might just play the story mode once and head right back to their RP servers.
So, will GTA 6 live up to the hype? Probably (or, if you ask a former Rockstar developer, it depends on whether it's delayed again). What we've seen so far points to Rockstar using its massive budget to polish the mechanics that modders with only a fraction of its budget have hacked together to create the ultimate lovechild of a chaotic sandbox and a true-life simulator.
