Rockstar Games has finally announced Red Dead Redemption 2, the sequel to the acclaimed Western epic that a lot of people I know hold up as Rockstar’s best game. Of course, the internet is thrilled; interest in this game is so high that Rockstar tweeting out a simple logo was enough to send every videogame website and personality from here to Blackwater into a tizzy. And why not? Another massive, handcrafted open world in a powerfully lifelike space that offers a deep single-player experience? No matter what you think of Rockstar’s chops, there’s something compelling about that.

Compelling, that is, if that's what we actually get. In the three years since Rockstar last released a game, something in the background has slowly shifted—something that the gaming media hasn't really talked about. It’s a change that might fundamentally alter what Rockstar is, and what their games look like going forward. If you’re an adherent to Rockstar’s old ways, you might not like it.

So, what happened? Four words: Grand Theft Auto Online.

When GTA Online launched a couple of weeks after the release of Grand Theft Auto V, the base game to which it’s attached, it seemed like an afterthought to many in the gaming press. An interesting diversion, but nothing transformative. The reviews were mixed, and aside from glancing at the occasional update, most of us forgot about it. The audience playing it didn’t, though. In fact, it grew. Exact numbers are hard to come by—publisher and Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive is cagey with that sort of thing—but according to a quarterly revenue report from November 2015, the game was, at that time, seeing eight million players every week.

This is insane. EA at the same time released numbers for players of the two most recent Battlefield games at the time, which were seeing only 4 million players per month. For a more recent metric, I glanced at Steam’s charts. As of writing, GTA Online is the seventh most-played game on PC, with 35,546 concurrent players. That’s at 2pm on a Tuesday, on just one of three platforms.

It’s not clear if eight million people still play GTA Online every week—Take-Two hasn’t released any more recent stats on that, which suggests the player base could very well have declined a bit—but we do know that the people who have played through its lengthy lifespan have made in-game microtransactions. A lot of them; according to numbers released as part of lawsuit proceedings after Leslie Benzies, the director of GTA Online and a former president at Rockstar, left the company, the game has generated $500 million in revenue for its publisher. Benzie’s legal complaint alleges that “these purchases have a nearly 100 percent profit margin subject only to nominal development costs and app-store commissions.”

Rockstar Games

Half a billion dollars will change the way anyone thinks, and for a major videogame publisher, it’s almost guaranteed that money like that is going to lead to a sea change. We’ve already seen it, in fact: there was talk, early in Grand Theft Auto V’s lifespan, of upcoming single-player downloadable content, similar to what Rockstar did with Grand Theft Auto IV. After the online version took off, that talk got a lot quieter. Instead, the only thing Rockstar has put out since 2013 has been a series of updates and expansions to GTA Online. In just a few years, GTA Online has become the most lucrative cash cow Take-Two and Rockstar have ever seen, and they’ve pulled out all the stops to keep players invested for as long as possible.

Which brings us back to our question: What is Red Dead Redemption 2 going to look like? Domains for Red Dead Online have already been registered by Take-Two, and some kind of online multiplayer for the title is inevitable. Will it resemble the vast, persistent world and miniature MMO stylings of Grand Theft Auto Online? I’m not a gambler, but a half-billion dollars certainly points to "yes." In fact, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Take-Two move in a direction that a lot of the industry has already gone in, sacrificing resources on singleplayer development in order to create a more substantial online offering. Online play, after all, offers a potential for profit that singleplayer just can’t match. In a world where triple-A production costs are soaring, anything that can offer half a billion in pure profit is more than just an incentive: it’s a means of making the business work.

Rockstar Games

There are still expectations attached to a Rockstar game. Players expect a meticulously crafted open world. They expect there to be things to do in it, and they expect a cinematically inclined narrative. I don’t imagine those are going to go away. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see too much beyond that. Rockstar is not the young, ambitious upstart it once was. In the 2000s, Rockstar was daring, even disruptive. Whether you loved or hated Grand Theft Auto, it changed the face of gaming, ushering in the age of open worlds and film pastiche storytelling. Bully and Manhunt were surprising, singular works built on the back of that success.

But now, Rockstar seems to have lost its interest in innovating in the singleplayer space. Grand Theft Auto V was downright conventional, a Rockstar open-world game made in the calcified blueprint of every one prior. And that was before the multiplayer made half a billion dollars. I wouldn’t expect Red Dead Redemption 2 to be any different. If you’re an adherent to the Rockstar of the 2000s, that might be painful to hear—but if you’re one of the eight million people who have fallen in love with the emergent criminal antics of GTA Online, it might be the best news you’ve heard all day.