A former cinematics editor who worked on GTA 5 has said Rockstar cancelled a single-player story DLC because of GTA Online’s breakout success as a “cash cow.”
The detail emerges from the SanInPlay YouTube channel, which recently spoke to Joseph Robino, who was a senior camera artist and virtual cinematographer at Rockstar from 2010 to 2016.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about cancelled GTA 5 DLC, as earlier this year in April, Trevor Philips’ voice actor, Steven Ogg, said his character originally had an expansion planned. The expansion would have supposedly starred Trevor as a Federal Investigation Bureau agent.
Now, according to Robino, that single-player DLC fell to the wayside after GTA Online proved to be wildly popular.
“A lot of the team went to do Red Dead Redemption 2 right away, and I took on this other project that was a standalone DLC for GTA that never came out, and it was kick-ass,” says Robino. “That was my thing. I was one of the main editors, camera artists, and on-stage stuff. We split our teams into two. I stayed on GTA Online and then this DLC, which Steven Ogg [the actor who played Trevor] was a very important part of.”
Robino continues on, estimating that the GTA 5 story DLC was roughly halfway through development before cancellation. He says some of that work was put into later iterations of GTA Online. Robino also confirms the DLC would have focused on Trevor as an FBI agent, and adopted a tone that was “James Bond Trevor.”
“It was really, really good. But when GTA Online came out, it was so much of a cash cow, and people were loving it so much that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would outcompete that. I think, looking back now, you could probably do both. But that was a business decision they made. I was a little upset about that,” Robino explains.
“That actually was a lot of the reason for me being a little sour at that time. Because I was like, yo, WTF, guys? This s**t’s awesome. Let’s keep going. Let’s finish this s**t.”
Robino also comments a bit on Rockstar’s notorious crunch of the time, as he was working on GTA 5, GTA Online, and Red Dead Redemption 2 simultaneously saying “We worked a lot, man. For six or seven years, I was working almost 365 days a year with our team.”
Of course, Rockstar’s current focus is squarely on Grand Theft Auto 6, which is currently set for a Fall 2025 release window. The big question right now is what the future of GTA Online looks like, and if a new iteration will be introduced with GTA 6 or not. Rockstar’s priorities may have shifted over the years, so we’ll have to wait and see if GTA 6 could have any additional story content planned, or if GTA Online will continue to be the focus.
