Since the addition of BattlEye to GTA V for PC, concurrent players on Steam have steadily dropped from 140,000 to around 84,000 at the time of this writing, a 40% drop.
The decline in player numbers is not due to the game having a lot of hackers, but rather because many of the game’s mods are no longer available. In fact, according to some social media accounts, hackers have already been able to bypass BattlEye, which is generally considered a fairly weak anti-cheat.
Kiddions, one of the most popular free modding sites, has already announced on their Discord that all of their mods and modding sites will no longer function in GTA Online, and that their future is “very uncertain.”
The problem with Rockstar Games is that 9 years is a lifetime for most games, and even without anti-cheat, the game has found its place in the modding community around the world. We know what new players are getting into when they start playing, and for some, the core experience Rockstar Games provides is not the reason they play, but the mods.
Rockstar Games also announced that the game will no longer be supported on Steam Deck or Linux devices, which will likely result in a drop in player numbers.
It’s unclear whether Rockstar Games will reverse this decision, but for now, it looks like the number of players playing GTA 5 on PC will continue to decline.
What do you think about Rockstar’s decision to implement BattlEye anti-cheat nine years after the release of GTA 5? Do you think they’ll reverse their decision? Let us know in the comments and join the discussion on the official Insider Gaming Forum.
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