Let the uproar among soccer moms and our politically correct mass media outlets begin! A new full-fledged GTA (Grand Theft Auto) has been released into the wild and with it comes the media circus that surrounds it about how we are corrupting our children’s minds with filth and building a society where stealing cop cars and blowing up doughnut shops is morally decent. Unfortunately for the GTA haters out there, I’m not here to dump on the violence in GTA. In fact, I'm a big fanboy of the whole series, with one small exception - I wish they would give a little more love to PC gamers.

When you approach GTA as a critical gamer, the immerse game play gives you plenty to take in. Rockstar Games has always been able to impress with this series and build new benchmarks for competition in the game industry to surpass.

There has, however, been a bit of backlash from GTA fans in past releases - and this release should be no different.

Firstly, I’m an avid PC gamer, so it should be of no surprise the last console I bought was the PS2. To put this into perspective, my friend gave me a red-ringed Xbox360 in otherwise great condition about six months ago and I’ve yet been motivated to spend the $60 to get it repaired. Why would I bother when every game I actually care about on Xbox or Playstation is released on PC anyways? Not to mention that I can build a PC that has equivalent (or better) hardware than the next generation of gaming consoles for close to the same price.

As for GTA, I played IV on my friend’s Xbox and I probably will do the same for GTA V, because I refuse to buy a gaming console when I have a perfectly good PC built for gaming.

The point is that gamers, whether they are console or PC gamers, are a very sensitive and divisive group. By releasing such a popular game for some platforms and not others you risk the chances of alienating a whole market. PC gaming is one colossal market, and probably not one you want to alienate. So maybe it’s not such a bad idea that Rockstar is not considering a PC release of this game at this time, since they offended every PC user who was a GTA fan last time around with their hideous port from console to PC.

Why is Rockstar Ignoring the PC?

Frankly, Rockstar has been horrible at porting games to the PC and I actually find it quite annoying since I am such a big fan of their games. GTA IV worked almost seamlessly on the consoles, but when they released it for PC the game was riddled with performance and graphics issues.

It’s as if they neglected the whole testing process when they were porting to the PC. If they can build such a huge hit of a game that brings in a ridiculous amount of revenue for them, why can’t they spend a little extra to make a good port to the PC?

Well, apparently PC gamers aren’t getting any love this time around either. Despite a handful of rumors and a leak from NVIDIA (which was later rescinded), Rockstar continues to say they will not release GTA V for the PC. I guess the software pirates and angry PC gamers got to them.

How very Microsoft of you, Rockstar.

If you are purely a PC gamer, you may feel a little better signing this petition by Change.org. That’s right, PC gamers are so angry right now at being slighted by Rockstar Games they have used a website usually dedicated for political change to make their voices heard. What a world we live in!

There is another theory: Rockstar doesn’t want to say anything about a PC release until they have a well-tested and respectable port to PC.

Unlike with GTA IV, where they released it in such a sad state and followed up with a series of patches, maybe they saw they want to make sure GTA V is done right this time around. There actually have been reports of proof in the hacked Xbox360 version of GTA V of a PC version. If this is in fact true, we are dealing with some very illusive developers.

Of course this is all speculation, but I’d like to believe that video game companies see PC gamers equal to their console counterparts because, guess what, I’m still not buying a PS3 or fixing that red-ringed Xbox360. I will stand strong with my fellow PC gamers and never back down, because we all know consoles are eventually going to be a thing of the past.

What do you think? Would you rather see a low quality PC release in the next few months, or are you willing to wait out the speculation and keep your fingers crossed for a high quality product next year? And how would your company deal with a similar situation? Would you put out a low quality product and try to patch it later, or would you miss deadlines to ensure that you were only giving your customers the best of the best? Give us your feedback in the comments section below.

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