14 DAY TRIAL // Grand Theft Auto is the most popular series in the whole open world sandbox genre. Ever since the first titles, the franchise received a lot of praises, and with its latest installment, GTA 4, the developer, Rockstar, gained critical acclaim for mixing the gritty realism of everyday life with the trademark humor of the series.
Dan Houser, one of the co-founders of Rockstar, recently spoke with Edge about how the user feedback was always important to the company. He also went on to say that, with any game since GTA III, the feedback was very biased – people either loved the game and praised it, or hated it and tarnished it with some very mean names.
"You always get so many opinions. The big thing that we have become aware of, having made any game – since GTAIII, really – is that everything you change, someone will love it and someone will hate it. And there’s no way you can account for that because you have to change it – you can’t just keep making the same thing again and again. But if you keep in mind that we changed things for reasons of integrity, in terms of design, then I think people overall responded amazingly to the game, both in terms of the critics and consumer response."
He further stated that the feedback about how the game handled or regarding glitches that rendered the gamers unable to play the GTA title was extremely important to the company. "You get concerns with things like the online not working for a few days and people not being able to get a game working, and that’s heartbreaking for us because we want everyone to have a smooth experience. We take that stuff as seriously as we possibly can, and make it as good as we can, so problems like that are really upsetting. But, overall, the fanbase seem to like the direction we’ve taken – they see what we’ve done and why we’ve tried to do it."
It's really nice that developers like Rockstar are very concerned about their fan base and try to deliver excellent titles for their customers. This made the company very popular with fans, who have always looked forward to the GTA titles, which translated into the sales records set by the games in the franchise.