Yeah, no shit. You think they're using consoles every time they need to test the game during developement?

Didn't devs say the pc version was coming out a year after console version?

They did and it is? What's that got to do with it? The year delay is because of a console exclusivity deal, not for technical reasons.

don't care, shit game from a shit company that extorts money from kids

I love this for rockstar

All games have a PC version. Not all games have a released PC version.

Development is done on PCs, so all games are first tested there…

I am not seeing any news about an exclusivity deal anywhere. You got a source?

Leak a cracked copy of the game or GTFO. Seems like a "viral" marketing campaign at this point. They must understand leaking videos is like free marketing for rockstar.

I mean, even just assumption based on the fact that it was the case every previous time is kind of enough.

But the main reason PC ports come out after console is, tuning for a variety of hardware. PCs are millions of different things. Consoles are like 5 things. Tuning for them is much quicker.

The more complex a game is, the longer the gap between it being ready for release on consoles and it being ready for release on literally anything between the minimum requirements they are willing to target and the highest end hardware currently available plus an attempt to future proof it for stuff that doesn't exist yet.

The exact timeframe can come down to an exclusivity deal, but the time isn't wasted.

Yeah, and to help explain, all games have a version that for sure works on a handful of PCs. No guarantee it would run on "your system". That is what takes so long for pc ports of console games. Not getting them to work on the devs pcs, getting them to work on as many pcs as possible across the world.

A console version of a game doesn't exist until it's finalized into that format... all major games are made on PC. But the dev version of the game isn't really a PC version of the game yet, it's just a version that runs on "this PC". The PC version has to run on as many PCs as possible for it to get released. That is what takes the time.

People keep saying this, and i can't entirely rule out that idea, but on the other hand i can't help but feel like it would be very stupid for rockstar to attach themselves to a cryptoscam. The crypto part of the leaks just makes them look really bad if they are truly behind this.

Leakers often just want attention they are starved of in their everyday lives.

No. The real reason is get people to double-dip.

So does all of the union busting and the hostile work environment/harassment scandals. Wouldn't be the first time.

I'm not a developer and I assumed yes that's what they did and that was what development kits were for ?

Well, that is true lol. I shouldn't be surprised if a company makes a stupid decision.

If they're developing it for both PC and consoles, it's probably more efficient to do most of the day to day testing of new features and bugfixes on PC.

Of course you'll also have to test each platform individually

One of the big advantages to modern operating systems like Windows (XBox) and Linux (PlayStation, though technically it's BSD but we're gonna ignore that) is it separates the program from the hardware enough that so long as both machines run the same OS, the software drivers for the hardware have the same interface, they can run the same programs*. This is helped by the hardware running the same kind of CPUs and GPUs so the only piece of variability left is performance.

In the olden days, where companies would make specialized silicon chips for custom graphics processing, the OS, drivers, and driver interfaces were so specific to the hardware you had to use something like a devkit

*I'm wildly over simplifying, there are some edge cases to this but it holds true for the most part

It likely is a PC build but it’s built like a console build. No KB/M support, no graphics settings you can tweak, etc. Nevertheless, hope this shit ends up online. Fuck em.

I'm a dev for a big multiplatform game, our team use a mix of pc and console builds during development, I think our art teams are exclusively testing the build on consoles. As someone else said, console devkits exist, they're a very good isolated environment with the target hardware and dedicated tooling so they're extremely helpful.

Obviously you want to test on the target hardware, but you don't exclusively test on it. You'll be using a PC build throughout the development, whether your target is playstation or a phone.

I'm not saying they don't have a console build at all, I'm saying the PC build existing is not at all surprising.

We got the PC leak before GTA VI

Yep, valid

Sam Rockstar is freaking out and that tells me that the studio is hella scared that the leaker man will release the files to the public.

Now Rockstar had a habit in the earlier games of leaving less then family friendly code comments in the engine source and using place holder assets that would violate copy-write not to mention what happened with the whole hot coffee incident in GTA San Andreas.

Other studios or hackers could get there hands on it and reverse engineer the code to either steal features or implement cheats for multiplayer.

I don't think it's an "exclusivity deal." This is what they've always done. It's to make some consumers purchase the game multiple times. It's just scummy behavior that they've been allowed to get away with.