Ex-GTA 5 dev reveals “cash cow” GTA Online ruined single-player DLC

A former Rockstar Games dev who worked on a scrapped GTA 5 single-player DLC has revealed that the “cash cow” of GTA Online was the reason we never saw anything. 

While plenty of Grand Theft Auto fans are looking forward to GTA 6 and everything that will bring, there are plenty of people who still play GTA 5 and GTA Online who have been looking back on what could have been. 

For many, the lack of a single-player DLC for GTA 5 has been seen as a big miss, especially as Rockstar has delivered some brilliant updates in the past with The Ballad of Gay Tony, The Lost and The Damned, and Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare expansion. 

Well, over the last few weeks, some insight into what Rockstar initially had planned for a GTA 5 DLC has come to the forefront and now former GTA dev Joe Rubino has blamed the “cash cow” of GTA Online. 

“You 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 out-compete that,” Rubino told YouTube channel SanInPlay at the start of July. 

The former Rockstar dev added that he was “upset” when it was scrapped as he wanted the team to do both, but it was a “business decision” that saw the DLC plan ended. 

“I was a little upset about that and actually was a lot of the reason for me being a little sour at that time. I was like “Yo, what the f*ck guys, this s*it’s awesome, let’s keep going, let’s finish this s*it,” he said. 

Ultimately, Rubino moved on to working on Red Dead Redemption 2 and some of the work for the single-player DLC went to GTA Online updates like The Doomsday Heist. 

Steven Ogg – the actor who played Trevor – revealed he’d even done motion capture for the update and other leaks have claimed that North Yankton and Liberty City-themed DLCs for single-player were also scrapped. Though, we’ll probably never see any of that happen.