'It was so much of a cash cow': Former GTA 5 dev implies ill-fated Agent Trevor DLC was sacrificed at the altar of GTA Online
"It was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would outcompete that."
There was a time, in the halcyon days of the 2000s to early 2010s, where we used to get new Grand Theft Auto games. Okay, to be fair, Grand Theft Auto 6 is on its way, but it's been over a decade since GTA 5 released—contrast that to the five years between GTA 4 and 5.
If patterns continue, we can reasonably expect GTA 7 to take 20 years to make, GTA 8 to take 40 years, and GTA 9 to take 80 years. Future legends will speak of a fabled GTA 11, which was begun by ancient gamesmiths 320 years before it arose from the crust of the earth to lay waste to the lands of Nu-Gameia.
I'm being glib here, but you can't deny that game development on one of Rockstar's flagship franchises has slowed down considerably. That's partially due to development times getting longer across the industry—but it's also due to the fact that GTA Online, the live service component of GTA 5, has made Rockstar approximately enough money to buy god.
According to former developer Joe Robino, who worked on GTA 5 as a virtual cinematographer and senior camera artist, GTA Online was so successful that it helped sink plans for a DLC focused on Trevor Philips. This sounds a whole lot like the "James Bond Trevor" DLC that was datamined by players, then later confirmed to have once been in development by Trevor's voice actor, Steve Ogg.
In an interview with the SanInPlay YouTube channel, Robino says that, after the game's release "a lot of the team went to do [Red Dead Redemption 2] right away, and I kinda took on this other project that was a standalone DLC for GTA that never came out, and it was kickass.
"It was really really good, but you know what happened was—when [GTA Online] came out, it was so much of a cash cow, and people were loving it so much, that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would outcompete that," Robino alleges. "I think looking back now I would say that you could probably do both, y'know?"
"That was a business decision that they made, and I was a little upset about that—and was actually a lot of the reason for me being a little sour at that time," Robino goes onto say that "we went about probably halfway through it, and then we put a pause on it, because GTA Online was just so… people were going crazy."
Despite GTA Online drawing the ire (deservedly so) of fans for various paywalls and cash-grabs over the years, Robino at least attributes the cancellation, in part, to a high workload—after all, Rockstar was to its credit developing Red Dead Redemption 2 at the time: "Look, like we worked a lot man, like for six or seven years … we were the first line of defence for story, mocap and editing, and a lot of the teams around us would develop from that."
I've gone ahead and reached out to Rockstar for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.
At the very least, we know that GTA 6 is coming sometime in Autumn 2025. As for when it'll be drifting onto PC? Well, Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar still need to read the stars and consult the innards of a golden cow, or something, first—with more announcements arriving "in due time".