Former Rockstar designer says the studio expected GTA Online to fail

GTA Online now looks like one of Rockstar's biggest wins, but the 2013 launch felt like the opposite. The mode sat on top of GTA V and immediately ran into bugs, unstable sessions and a thin set of things to do. Even inside the studio, people were not sure the project would last.

Matt Friedman, a former designer who worked on GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Max Payne 3, talked about that in an interview with Eldorado.gg. As he remembers it, the scale the game later reached because of the online mode ran far past the forecasts of the time. He thinks the fifth game would not have grown this large without it.

The amount of content was the sharpest worry. Friedman recalls QA telling him that everything prepared for the online mode could be finished in about four hours. Inside the building, he says, people were convinced the thing would fail. The team knew that and still decided to see what happened after launch. The rough start did not stop the mode from later outrunning those expectations.