The GTA Trilogy studio head says that a perfect remake is up to Rockstar.

The complete cultural impact that GTA III, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas have on the history of digital entertainment makes any attempt at modernization a daunting task. The executive expressed understanding of the weight of this heritage and gratitude for the chance to update these works, but emphasized the extreme difficulty in creating a definitive version that can protect the production from the collective nostalgia. In the manager’s view, a flawless recreation would only come to fruition if it was entirely under the responsibility of Rockstar North itself, the development team that created the classic works in previous generations, justifying that any outsourced studio would be inevitably crushed by harsh comparisons.

The defense of the project came directly from Thomas Williamson, CEO of Grove Street Games, in a statement given to the website Wccftech. The leader admitted that he agrees with much of the discontent expressed by the community at the time of the release, but argued that the market’s view on the commercial performance of the trilogy was skewed by negative external perception. The executive claimed that internal engagement metrics collected by the developer indicated a massive number of users truly enjoyed the game package, although there was a significant portion of enthusiasts demanding much higher quality.

Trying to downplay the disaster of one of the decade’s most disastrous launches by appealing to hidden satisfaction reports seems like a corporate juggling act to clear the studio’s own image.

Releasing a broken product on virtual shelves relying on the brand’s weight to drive sales is one of the worst habits that have plagued the industry in recent years. The collection accumulated a flood of severe complaints due to catastrophic optimization failures, disfigured character models, and absurd collision issues. A noticeable change in this trajectory began to take shape after the application of a long series of technical patches and corrective updates distributed from 2021 onwards, which finally brought the performance of Vice City and San Andreas to acceptable standards, which unexpectedly resulted in a more positive reaction from users and belated positive reviews on Steam pages. This late recovery shows that the product had potential, which makes it all the more unforgivable that the directors approved the initial release of such a neglected product.