The entire world is waiting for Grand Theft Auto VI, the upcoming sandbox crime simulator from Rockstar Studios, set to release this fall. As a brand, GTA transcends video games, bleeding so profusely into popular culture that it’s consistently referenced in TV shows, movies, and even CNN panels. It’s spawned legendary memes and copycat games. Hell, even boomers know what Grand Theft Auto is — even if it’s just through name recognition alone.
With that kind of cultural cachet, the immense hype surrounding GTA VI is understandable. Rockstar hasn’t released a game since 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, and its last GTA title launched over a decade ago — moving over 210 million copies, making it the second-highest selling game of all time.
But for the last 11 years, it’s been GTA V’s wildly popular online multiplayer mode that has kept the game alive well past the point where most people may have walked away after the main story. GTA Online has maintained a large and passionate fanbase that continues to thrive year after year — according to a November 2024 Ampere Analysis insight, GTA V still pulls in around 20 million players a month between its single and multiplayer components.
The continued success of GTA V long after its release is largely thanks to players who took Rockstar’s multiplayer blueprint and built something unique: a rich role-playing world with servers hosted all across the globe. GTA RP (short for roleplay) as it’s called, garners thousands of daily viewers on streaming platforms like Twitch, and can earn content creators and server hosts a rather lucrative income. Some of the world’s biggest streamers, like Valkyrae, have turned GTA RP into a bona fide soap opera-like serial, something their audiences watch with deep investment, even without playing themselves.
It’s so popular that Rockstar bought FiveM, a popular mod project that lets players join customized dedicated servers with better gameplay and advanced features, back in 2023 — nearly 10 years after banning three people responsible for the mod from online play.
But what comes next? With GTA VI and potentially a brand-new online mode on the horizon, RP players are optimistic that the future of GTA roleplaying will be bright.
The lifeblood of GTA Online
GTA Online was released in October 2013, just a month after the main game launched. Rather than follow a strict storyline like you would when playing the GTA V campaign, Online lets players freely roam through the fictional city of San Andreas as a fully customizable (and silent) protagonist trying to build a criminal empire. Players can buy businesses, rob banks, toy around in supercars, or join others in cooperative heists.
Nearly 12 years later, Rockstar still regularly updates GTA Online with new content packs, but for many, it’s not this regular upkeep that has kept the game alive — it’s RP. But this wasn’t always the case; while GTA Online was wildly popular prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was during the lockdown that roleplaying broke through into the greater online consciousness.
“When I started, which was in 2020, the hobby wasn’t super mainstream yet; it had its niche, but participating wasn’t mainstream, it wasn’t what people thought of when they thought of GTA,” Australian RP enthusiast and narrative writer Elizabeth DeLoria tells Rolling Stone. “Now I find it’s the other way around, people think of GTA Online and go, ‘Oh the roleplay servers, right?’”
But if you’re not familiar with it, the GTA RP community is as vast as it is convoluted.
First, it’s only available to those who play GTA Online on PC, and it requires you to download a modification software (like FiveM), find a server that you like and can get into (there are text-only servers, cyberpunk-style servers, faction-based servers, and more, and they are often either full or so exclusive you need to be interviewed by a host to get in), and run Discord alongside your modded game to both validate who you are and coordinate with other players.
It’s quite a large barrier to entry, but every person who regularly plays RP will tell you that it’s worth it. Taking the rigorous steps to join the community opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
Becoming someone else
GTA RP isn’t just for wannabe thespians or improv students — for many, it’s a chance to socialize in a space that feels more comfortable than the real world, like a kind of contemporary crime-ridden Second Life.
“There are a lot of people on the server that aren’t very outgoing, or they’re a little more introverted, and RP helps bring that extrovert out in them,” says Lord Kebun, a GTA RP player with nearly 700,000 followers on Twitch. In the early days of RP, when the mode was less well-known, that chance to socialize often meant that people with vastly different ideological and cultural backgrounds would play together.
“You had people that would fit into a Call of Duty lobby just fine, you had dudes who were truckers and playing from their trucks, you had a lot of veterans, you had women, people of color, queer people, everyone just kind of enmeshed,” DeLoria explains. “People could explore who they could be for the first time in their lives, which is why I think a lot of older people like GTA RP.”
For DeLoria and many others, that niche version of GTA RP offered a seemingly limitless space for exploration and expression, with surprising results. “I’ve seen people start this game as someone I would not want to interact with in real life, at all — diehard Trumpers, people who were very into the Confederacy — and then after six months they have a total shift,” she says.
In September 2022, things changed: a massive hack resulted in tons of GTA VI development footage leaking, which also seemed to include the source code for GTA V. That code was privately traded amongst cheat builders and fellow hackers for over a year before it reportedly went public. Though it was a nightmare for Rockstar, the source code leak was a modder’s dream, and many RP players believe it helped catapult the mode to new heights.
“That code came out, and that was it, it was done. You could decompile the whole game, people could do whatever they wanted,” DeLoria says. “The timing was, weird to say, good because people had disposable income and weren’t going out because of Covid and were spending it on this instead … and then this sort of weird thing happened where instead of shutting it down, Rockstar bought FiveM.”
Back in 2023, Rockstar North Senior Design Director Scott Butchard told GamesRadar that GTA Online’s ongoing development has been a “beautiful partnership with the community.” When asked by Rolling Stone about the purchase of FiveM or its potential impact on the future of GTA Online, representatives from Rockstar declined to comment.
“Now, we’re seeing a lot of third-party investment in servers … there’s been a bit of a server boom, because it has become easier to host and make your own server,” DeLoria says. “There’s sort of three types of roleplay servers now, you’ve got your mainstream ones, where the old hat people who are already quite comfortable socially or the content creators hang out. You’ve got a type of server specifically targeted to people of color, and those servers are crazy by the way … they have awesome scripts and features. And then the ones that popped up more recently are the spaces for more neurodivergent, queer folks, that’s where you get a lot more niche roleplay like fantasy ones, ones with werewolves, a cyberpunk one.”
DeLoria frequents the mainstream servers a lot, where she often steps into service roles, like slotting into open shifts at the in-game hospital or helping preside over an important trial as a GTA judge. “I know more about California law than I do Australian law,” she jokes.
Streamers like Scottish comedian Rosco McClellaland, however, tend to play GTA RP as pure chaos agents, jumping into a scene to inject some humor into a tense situation. The most popular form of GTA RP is a cops and robbers kind of vibe, and McClellaland loves to drop into an active crime scene and act like a blissfully unaware (and doggedly responsible) delivery driver.
“If people are doing a very serious storyline or a very serious character, I can just interject for a bit and read the room, not outstay my welcome, add a bit of comic relief and jump back out,” McClelland says. “For people who are playing ‘Law,’ (a fictional version of the in-game court system) it can get quite like, ‘Oh there’s a guy with a gun and he’s robbing a bank’ over and over. Well, how about my character turns up with a wagon full of planks and goes, ‘Did someone order 10 planks?’ And then they’re like ‘No,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, I have to deliver these.’ And then I’m just putting planks outside the law office going ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just the delivery guy.’”
Lord Kebun says the game mode is still wildly popular on streaming sites because it is entertainment in its purest form. “There are people who watch the streams that aren’t even involved with gaming, didn’t care about GTA beforehand, but they watch it as if it’s their show, like it’s their favorite series.”
The potential GTA VI online
Rockstar is a notoriously tight-lipped studio, and though GTA VI has a vague fall 2025 release window for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S (with PC coming at a later date), the company has technically not confirmed that the game will have an online component. But diehard GTA RP players know this is the studio’s M.O., and the promise of an entirely new sandbox to play in has content creators itching for GTA VI — especially if it’s being built in tandem with GTA modders, which many believe may be the case thanks to Rockstar’s FiveM purchase.
“It’s almost impossible to fuck up,” DeLoria exclaims. “If Rockstar goes zero to 100 on it, and lets third-party developers do what they want and not be weird about it, just open the gates and make it as accessible for modding as possible, they might be able to recapture that lightning in a bottle. The hype is there, even though they’ve done literally nothing, the bare minimum.”
The RP community is excited for GTA VI’s updated graphics, which will feel like a massive visual and technological leap after playing a 12-year-old game originally meant for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They’re hopeful that, this time around, Rockstar will lean into RP out of the gate and potentially leverage FiveM to set up official roleplaying servers that will run even better than the fan-made ones.
“The system is already really good, considering the jiggery-pokery that’s been done to it,” McClelland says. “But there are certain limitations, there are complications. If Rockstar can just sort that out and push the boundaries…” He trails off, considering the possibilities of a GTA RP community unburdened by boundaries and free to experiment with the world Rockstar gives them.
But RP players are even more excited for the chance to explore an entirely new world: Vice City, GTA’s neon-soaked, cocaine-fueled version of Miami.
“The map is a huge deal,” DeLoria says when asked about the excitement around GTA VI. “We’ve been playing in Los Angeles for ten years, we are so excited to go somewhere else. People in this community are thinking, ‘Oh my god, we’re gonna get to roleplay in Florida.’ They’re talking about different biomes, because the GTA V map has different biomes, but it’s kind of just city, beach, desert, that’s it. GTA VI? We’re talking swamp, beaches, city, and more — Florida is crazy.”
DeLoria says the Floridian wildlife (known for its variety, from alligators and panthers to bull sharks and cottonmouth snakes) has players hoping there will be Red Dead Redemption 2-style hunting mechanics in GTA VI. “We’re gonna go gator wrestling,” she says with a laugh. “People are already planning their characters around it.”
GTA VI’s December 2023 trailer (currently over 250 million views on YouTube) suggests Rockstar knows how crucial RP is to its game-winning formula. Though the trailer (set to “Love is a Long Road” by Tom Petty) introduces the Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque dual protagonists and their plight, it spends much of its time showcasing the denizens of Vice City and the surrounding area — the Florida Men and Women, if you will. The cast of characters felt less like supporting NPCs you’ll encounter during the main campaign and more like potential roles for RP players to slot into.
“The lady with the two hammers!” DeLoria shouts, referencing a split-second moment in the trailer in which a woman stands on the sidewalk in a nightgown, a hammer in each hand. “The rest of the trailer was great, but in this community, the two things about that trailer no one would shut up about are the lady with the two hammers and that stripper on the car. People are like, ‘I’m going to be that old lady with the two hammers, I’m so excited, I’m just going to dual-wield hammers. I’m going to have the best time.’”