GTA clones are a dying breed and we think we know why

There used to be loads of GTA clones, but they’ve gradually dwindled (Rockstar)

As the launch of GTA 6 approaches, why are other publishers no longer trying to copy the most successful video game ever?

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that expression is especially relevant for the games industry. It’s full of copycats – or clones as they’re often referred to – and while the term can be used derogatorily, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Game of the Year contender Astro Bot was praised for its similarities to Super Mario Galaxy; Yooka-Laylee’s biggest selling point was how much it explicitly copied from Banjo-Kazooie; and without any new Castlevania games, fans don’t complain when titles like Hollow Knight crib elements from Konami’s series.

One franchise that used to get many imitators was Grand Theft Auto and you’d think they would have grown even more commonplace given the series’ enduring popularity. Yet it seems the opposite has happened instead, with fans having less direct alternatives than ever in the more than decade long wait for GTA 6.

What is a GTA clone?

First, we need to settle on what constitutes as a GTA clone. Fortunately, there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject, which highlights the following elements:

Open world environment that can be freely explored
Gunplay and vehicles
A sequence of missions to progress the story that involve shooting and/or driving
Optional side-missions and mini-games
A storyline that includes themes of crime, violence, drugs, sex, and other mature (potentially controversial) topics

The mid-2000s were full of such games, following the release of GTA 3, and some even spawned their own series, such as Mafia, The Getaway, and, of course, Saints Row.

While none of them reached the same level of popularity as GTA, they cultivated their own audiences during that decade, offering developer Rockstar some healthy competition.

When looking back over the 2010s, though, there are signs that the well was already drying up. That’s not to say GTA clones vanished overnight. We found a fan curated list of them on Reddit, and you can see such titles started coming out less frequently but never entirely went away. 2006 alone had eight GTA clones but a decade later in 2016, only two were released.

It does omit some examples, like The Simpsons: Hit & Run and Lego City Undercover, and we contest the inclusion of Cyberpunk 2077 (which has some rough similarities but is an action role-player first and foremost), but even so it’s clear that publishers were no longer trying to compete directly with Rockstar.

Lego City Undercover screenshot — Lego City Undercover was actually a great little game (Warner Bros. Games)

This can also be seen in those aforementioned series that were poised as GTA’s main competition. The Mafia series (which is published by GTA parent company Take-Two) fell off the map after 2016’s Mafia 3 (barring a couple remasters) and is only now slated to make a comeback with 2025’s Mafia: The Old Country.

The Getaway hasn’t had a new entry since 2006 and only lives on as a TV show that most people probably don’t know is based on a video game. Meanwhile, Saints Row is likely dead thanks to the underwhelming 2022 reboot and closure of developer Volition.

It’s especially surprising there haven’t been more blatant copycats in recent years given the long gap between GTA 5 and GTA 6. If anything, that was the perfect opportunity to give desperate fans an alternative to chew on, but now GTA 6 is due to come out in 2025 (barring any delays).

Why are there so few GTA clones?

So, what could be the cause of this? The simplest explanation is that GTA is just too big to compete with nowadays. GTA 5 first came out in 2013 and even then it was a huge money maker, making $1 billion in only three days.

It didn’t achieve that by luck, or merely good game design, but in large part because it was the most expensive video game of all-time, with an estimated budget of over £170 million ($214 million). Rockstar hasn’t said how much GTA 6 is costing them but rumours suggest $2 billion (including ongoing support and marketing).

Even if that’s not true the fact that it can’t be discounted out of hand tells you all need to know about why other publishers don’t even try to compete. Especially when you consider the huge amount of talented staff you’d need and the massive time frame involved in actually making the game.

The more GTA 5 continues to rake in money, the more Rockstar has to spend on GTA 6 and the less able everyone else is of making a comparable game.

GTA Online, the multiplayer mode that is primarily responsible for GTA 5’s longevity, doesn’t just print money, its constant updates ensure that while there are no new games, from Rockstar or anyone else, fans are still kept engaged with new content. If it had been less popular then we would’ve got GTA 6 a lot earlier than this.

GTA 6 is not just an important release for Rockstar and Take-Two, but for the industry as a whole. Grand Theft Auto is one of a handful of game franchises where even people who’ve never touched a video game know about it.

It’s part of a wider global culture and a new entry means a lot of money stands to be made, which in turn could lead to an invigorated interest in the wider games market from both a consumer and investor standpoint.

The industry may love chasing trends but GTA 6 has ascended beyond that. Trying to ride its coattails with a similar game risks only garnering a fraction of its success and most publishers won’t be satisfied with that.

Normally that doesn’t put them off – it certainly hasn’t stopped them all trying to jump on the live service game bandwagon – but the money and effort required to make a GTA clone on the same scale as Rockstar Games is just too much.

Technically, someone like Microsoft or Sony could afford it, but for them it’s not worth the risk. Not when they already make money off every microtransaction in GTA Online.

The Getaway key art — GTA clones were commonplace in the early 2000s (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Why aren’t there more crime-based video games?

The logistical explanation for why there are so few GTA clones is fairly straightforward but what’s more puzzling is that so few games take the more obvious route of trying to make a crime-themed game that’s set in the real world but doesn’t necessarily have the size or scope of GTA.

Cops and robbers is one of the stalwarts of the playground and yet despite Rockstar proving how popular the concept still is, there are very few games that deal with the concept or any of the other crime-related activities in GTA.

The nominees for The Game Awards 2024 were recently announced and of the dozens of games included only two non-indie titles, that weren’t sports sims, were set in the real world, with no overt fantasy elements: Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (a series which was at one point compared to GTA but is now far too over-the-top to bear any real resemblance).

Setting a game in the real world is not necessarily any more expensive than a fantasy setting. There’s almost no real-world licensing in GTA, to make it seem authentic, so it’s very hard to understand why there aren’t more attempts to create a crime game with a similar tone but a smaller scale.

There are games like Payday, but ignoring the mess that franchise has got itself into it’s a fairly minor hit in the grand scale of things and certainly something you can imagine a big publisher doing better.

So why aren’t there more heist games? More police games (from both sides of the law)? More street racing games? More gang management titles or drug-running simulators? Or any of the other many ideas which GTA touches upon but doesn’t always cover in detail.

To distinguish themselves further these games could be more serious in tone… or more comedic. They could be based on an existing licence (how about a video game version of Heat or Ocean’s Eleven?) or an extension of an existing franchise. But it never happens and there’s no sign it ever will.

This is the greatest puzzle of GTA’s success, to the point where you can only assume publishers feel anything crime related is going to fail, because people will always prefer Rockstar’s games.

Perhaps they judge that because GTA Online is so successful there’s no space for another crime-based game and that it’s impossible to pry enoughpeople away from GTA. That does make some amount of sense but why did it take them two years and innumerable failures to realise the same thing about live service games?

Why don’t Rockstar make more games?

At this point, the only one capable of delivering something truly GTA-like is, funnily enough, Rockstar itself. Red Dead Redemption is very similar, including in terms of its level of success, and there’s still some demand for a sequel to Bully, aka GTA in school.

But given how important GTA is and how each iteration gets bigger and bigger, Rockstar is increasingly finding less and less time to work on anything else.

After GTA 5, the only wholly new game it released was Red Dead Redemption 2. Even after it comes out, GTA 6 will likely take up most of the studio’s time for a decade or more and if they have time to make anything else it’ll probably just be Red Dead Redemption 3.

It may be a stretch to say the era of GTA clones is over, as smaller takes on the concept will always exist, whether it’s mid-budget AAA games like the new Mafia title or indie titles like 2019’s Shakedown: Hawaii.

But for all intents and purposes GTA is too big to copy and as the cost of making games continues to rise that’s only going to become more true over time. The only thing that might change the status quo is if GTA 6 isn’t a success, but the chances of that are even more remote than another publisher making a big budget crime game.