Rockstar’s long-running Social Club platform may be shuttered ahead of the next Grand Theft Auto game.
VideoTechUK, a news account focused on the developer’s games, discovered that all mentions of the Rockstar Social Club have been scrubbed from its website. Instead, the Social Club has been retitled as ‘the Rockstar Games Platform.’
The Rockstar Social Club has been around for 15 years, having first debuted with Grant Theft Auto IV all the way back in 2008. (Sorry.) Similar to Origin for EA or Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net, the service authenticates the online and multiplayer components in Rockstar titles like Red Dead Redemption II and Grand Theft Auto V.
So far, no players have reported any outages or authentication issues, so the change is just superficial. Still, it’s notable in how Rockstar is preparing to unveil Grand Theft Auto 6 (or whatever it’s called) themselves, and the social elements that will surely be a part of it, including the next iteration of Grand Theft Auto Online.
This past August, the developer acquired a pair of roleplay communities that specialize in GTA Online and Red Dead Online. Roleplaying is a popular act in online games of this type (see No Man’s Sky or Fallout 76), and Rockstar previously gave its blessing to the roleplay community for GTA Online last year.
In the same way that GTA 4 marked a turning point for Rockstar and its open-world crime series, it may be this next GTA game will be similarly significant in some capacity.
