Rockstar Games co-founder and the former lead writer on almost every mainline Grand Theft Auto game – except for the upcoming GTA 6 – thinks the gaming industry is faced with the “danger” of being too focused on printing money instead of simply making interesting games.
GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2’s lead writer, Dan Houser, appeared on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch show to talk about his past and future projects, where he was also asked about where the games industry in general will go next. According to the Rockstar veteran, gaming can go down one of two roads.
“It can go – you know, with all things – it can either go somewhere really interesting or somewhere that gets overly focused on making money,” Houser said. “I think there’s always that danger with any commercial art form that they get distracted by money, but there’s still a big scene creatively to make these kinds of living narrative experiences.”
That said, Houser was a little less gung ho about predicting a winner, so he sort of split the trophy in two. “I think they’ll both win,” he said. “I think there’ll be two paths. We’ve already seen that in spaces within the games industry where they both kind of win.”
It’s a problem that’s maybe always affected the industry, but in recent years, it’s been very hard not to see the influence of corporate greed on games as private equity and bigger tech companies get involved. You don’t need to look much further than the endless amounts of ‘live service’ fluff floating out there, which are more or less glorified real-money storefronts/gambling devices, rather than artful or directed experiences.
Still, Houser’s right in the sense that developers of all sizes are still coming out with great games and finding great success at the same time. Self-published indies like Hades 2, Hollow Knight Silksong, and Peak gave me some hope this year, at least.
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