GTA Metaverse!

Crimes on the blockchain 

Grand Theft Auto is the biggest franchise in gaming. Probably. I'm willing to bet it's at least up there, although depending on how you choose to independently measure scale and size I'll willing to bet you could land on just about any game being the biggest. GTA has the biggest recognition value by market trends, in that whatever strives it makes will quickly become industry standard. COD probably makes the most sales due to how often it comes out. Earth 2 has the most loyal numbskulls who desperately sink their life savings in the hopes that Earth 2 is going to be a game that anyone even knows about when it drops. So I'm happy suggesting that Rockstar have quite some pull in whatever it is they want to do with the direction of their game and the grounds they want to cross. Heck, you could say that GTA: Online has single handed changed the trajectory of the Ubisoft games as all of them have attempted to copy what that game did since 'Black Flag'. (To hardly comparable success)

As such it makes sense that if you're a scrappy up and comer with the 'new way of doing things' that you want to become the standard across the industry, it makes total sense that you'd be ecstatic that Rockstar's seminal crime franchise was supporting it too. Ecstatic enough to distend and distort the news in front of you into reading whatever fashion best supports the ideals that you support. I mean we've all been there haven't we? When the words in front of us say one thing to us and something else to the person next to us? It's common human nature to try and bring everything into line with our world view, which is the reason why I don't necessarily blame the crypto bros for reading the recent GTA 6 supposed leaks (Which I do not take for gospel, mind; I still find their timing suspect) regarding the rewards of some missions and thinking they've finally found their golden boy in GTA.

But first, what is it that Cryptobros have to do with gaming? Well for some reason, presumably because of the size of gaming as an entertainment model, dozens of crypto products get their start nowadays by promising to revolutionise gaming by introducing blockchain integration into their new game which is going to revolutionise the world. Whether that's through some sort of vapid NFT marketplace, or Play-to-Earn economy or just another stupid bloody 'landsale'. It's the corruption of the art of gaming into some sort of vaguely disguised investment model where the little people stumble over themselves believing there's some sort of path to financial success and the early adopters and creators make the big bucks off their sweat and tears. It's cynical and largely antithetical to a lot of the current drives of gaming, not least in the way it ties real-world economics into the fake world of games. But where does GTA 6 fit into all of this?

Well one of the leaks that followed the recent 'blowout', aside from the female protagonist and the Bonny and Clyde style antics, was a bit about the economy of the game. Somehow, without being able to detail the narrative or any actual missions, our leaker was able to provide details on the reward of some missions, (one of the reasons I'm calling all of these leaks suspect) namely that some would reward the character with Cryptocurrency. Of course, that set off a spark in the eyes of the Moonbros reading such an article, and I can only assume they immediately clicked off the covering article they were reading the second they finished reading those words, as that's the only way they could miss the qualifying statement that most articles have directly following that: how it's referring to an 'in-game' cryptocurrency, not a real world one.

Which makes sense, doesn't it? Grand Theft Auto has always based itself in a facsimile of the real world that emulates the fads and trends of the day to turn them into jokes because that's always been the beating heart of the GTA franchise; one of a big joke. The amount of articles I've seen recently of people who clearly have no idea what they're talking about claiming 'GTA needs to grow up' boggles the mind. I figure they must have just played Red Dead, fallen for the epic tale of a family of robbers falling apart and gone "Huh, you know if GTA didn't have all those jokes then it would be just as emotional as this" No it wouldn't. Because that isn't GTA's mission statement. It's a funhouse mirror placed up to whatever generation they're aiming at in order to make fun of hyper inflated versions of today's issues; and I wouldn't be surprised if this whole 'GTA needs to grow up' diatribe doesn't end up in the spotlights.

Crypto currency and their many financial woes is big news for the much struggling investors desperate for it to take off so that their financial investments can mean something. That's a joke that's already writing itself, of course Rockstar are going to jump on that bandwagon to get their own shots in! GTA V had the heavily underutilised Stock Market feature which allowed you to day trade, I can imagine Crypto will function within the game much the same as that, only probably with at least one mission where your exchange gets hacked and you lose a big chunk of the crypto you had saved up, were I to speculate. Those believing that GTA 6 was going to become a metaverse haven for them and theirs were straight dreaming, there's no money for Rockstar in alienating most of their fans with a scheme that most of them don't understand and those that do are actively hostile towards. Which is the problem with WEB3 in a nutshell; they're always trying to land the plane before the airport has started construction, and end up crashing into a fiery mess because of it.

However that doesn't mean that this representation isn't going to good for the Crypto space, because it absolutely will be. (providing the leaks are true, which I don't believe that they are but this concept seems plausible enough to probably end up in the next GTA anyway.) Even if Rockstar throws in Cryptocurrencies literally just to make fun of them and what they represent, their very inclusion in a video game of that magnitude will invariably do wonders to legitimise crypto and introduce it to some people who don't care enough to research on their own. Reputation might take a hit, but those are foundations to build upon. Do I find that encouraging? Not particularly; I can't see a single benefit from Crypto in the modern age and when the platform becomes bigger I can only see it being defanged into nothing more than a pumped up version of normal finance; similar to how Streaming services are steadily becoming traditional TV.

So no, sorry to disappoint all the Cryptoheads out there, GTA 6 won't be the amazing posterboy of Metaverse madness that all of you want it so desperately to be. You'll just have to clash your brains together to make your own terrible crypto game with pay-to-win garbage leaking out of the rafters and a nonsensical gameplay loop that sounds mindnumbingly boring to anyone who isn't profiteering directly off of it. In fact, I'd argue that Moonbros should probably just hit up Peter Molyneux and ask him to make their DeFi game; he tends to be pretty experienced in putting together scams for his audience. (Ever since he got that 'lifetime acheivements' reward and suffered a midlife crisis, it's just been downhill ever since.) Oh wait, he's already on his own NFT grift. Better luck next time.