As I’m sure you’ve noticed trending across social media today, there’s talk of a Red Dead Redemption remaster or remake being in the works. The source? A curious new entry by South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee.

The database reveals that title “Red Dead Redemption” was rated on 15th June 2023 – the entry is separate to all other Red Dead entries such as the original RDR, plus RDR2, leading cowpokes to board the hype train straight to Blackwater.

Now for context, this isn’t really a “leak”, South Korea’s GRAC is an official ratings board, much like ESRB in the US and PEGI in the EU; it has a reputation across gaming media for being pretty speedy with new ratings, leading to games being been spotted first on the database before they were even announced – an appearance usually indicates an announcement or release is due “soon” according to Kotaku. Most notably, a similar event happened with the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition release back in September 2021, in which a GRAC entry confirmed the existence of the project before a public announcement a month later.

The facts

• GRAC ratings have previously confirmed other games existence before public announcements
• This entry is separate from all other Red Dead related releases, including old bundles such as GOTY Edition
• Classification code includes “NV”, which apparently indicates a console release as PC is usually listed separately with “NP” (according to Gematsu)
• The classification includes the term “body damage”, which is new for this title and only appears in RDR2’s rating (according to Reddit)
• The classification includes a reference to “dead bodies being infected with zombie viruses”, indicating the inclusion of RDR’s DLC Undead Nightmare

So what could it mean? Well above the rest, it’s speculation for the time being. Fans have been gagging on their oatcakes for a modern and accessible way to play this masterpiece for a long time, especially after re-connecting with John and the gang in RDR2. There’s been rumours of a remaster churning in the past, but it has been all quiet on the western front in that regard. So here we are now, and what better way to celebrate just how special this game still is, 13 years on, than a souped up remaster or a full blown remake using RDR2 assets? We’re all giddy at the thought.

The game was removed from Playstation Now, the Sony Cloud service, back at the end of 2022, so presently the only way to play the game is via Xbox backwards compatibility or by dusting off your OG PS3.

Realistically speaking of course, it may not be a remaster or a remake at all, so make sure you fully take that into consideration! There’s opposing opinions that it could be a Switch port given Rockstar’s relationship with Nintendo over recent years. There’s also voices suggesting it could be just a port to last and current gen consoles (without improvements) to increase exposure, though I use the word “just” lightly as this would still be a huge win for the community at large. There’s also other questions coming in all directions, such as; Why is there no platform listed like the other Red Dead titles? Why does the title not include an indicator of a re-release such as “Definitive Edition” or “Remastered”? What about a PC version of RDR? What about RDR2 4K60FPS?

The verdict

Beyond our wants and desires, nothing can be answered factually right now, so lets keep our noses clean. Essentially, this new GRAC rating is legitimate, but it simply seems to indicate that something appears to be happening in the Rockstar kitchen, but until official corroboration, we’re left to chew the fat until the cows come home and we may already be in over our heads with expectation. As always, keep your vibes positive and your thoughts in check, as you never know what’s around the corner. Our hearts are absolutely ready for anything more to come from this legendary series. Join us in our dedicated Red Dead section of GTAForums until then!

The post What the Fact? Rumor Mill: Red Dead Redemption re-rated in South Korea appeared first on GTANet.com.

You may have noticed that the Internet, our forums and even the games media have started reporting that GTA VI’s release window may just have been revealed based on new Take-Two future outlook information, and based on history, we can absolutely say that might very well have been the case.

Let’s begin.

A Look Back

Take-Two conference calls, despite being intended for the consumption of financial media and corporate investors, always attract large amounts of attention from the fanbase, especially in the run-up to a potential announcement of a new Rockstar game. Well, this also applies when the news drought sets in, as it happened many times during GTAV and RDR2’s pre-release, and even now with the lack of a GTA VI announcement.

In August 2011, two months prior to GTA V’s announcement, Take-Two held one of these conferences, in which they expected a large increase in their price per share for Fiscal Year 2013.

Now, for some additional context, Fiscal Years aren’t the same as Calendar Years: in corporate finance, a Fiscal Year usually goes from April, to March of the following year – meaning that Take-Two’s Fiscal Year 2025 would go from April 2024, to March 2025.

With that out of the way, in 2011, when Take-Two announced this suspicious increase in their expectations for Fiscal 2013 (April 2012 – May 2013, remember that GTA V was originally slated for Spring 2013), our own Kirsty here at GTANet made some interesting observations that can still be seen via the Web Archive.

• Take-Two had increased their net income expectations for Fiscal 2013 to values only seen with the release of GTA IV – a net income of $2 per share;
• Take-Two’s average dollar per share value at that moment was projected to reach $0.35/share (remember T2 didn’t have GTA V here yet to make this number big), with the releases of LA Noire and Duke Nukem Forever.
• Red Dead Redemption’s release in 2010 had reached $1.06/share as a comparison.

Putting all those numbers into perspective, you can imagine how the sudden increase to $2 per share was suspicious to investors (in a good way) and fans alike. And indeed Kirsty’s analysis was correct.
Two months later in October 2011, GTA V was announced. Without a date, but it seems clear that Take-Two/Rockstar already had something in mind, as is usual in game development – minus delays of course, which did happen.

Throughout the years, these kinds of increases have pretty much always matched a Rockstar release, RDR2 included.

The Now

Take-Two is a much bigger beast than it was in 2011. It has bigger IP, more studios on their roster, and GTA Online exists, which brought their numbers hundreds if not thousands of times up.

Despite this, it’s still very easy to analyse when something is “off”. To this day, Rockstar releases are still the only ones that drive up revenue for Take-Two the most. Sure, they have other games and IP that do well, but not over 2 billion in net revenue well.

Indeed, in today’s earnings press release, Take-Two says it expects net bookings in the range of $5.45 to $5.55 billion for Fiscal 2024 (Apr 2023 – Mar 2024)… and a whopping eight billion for Fiscal 2025 (again, Apr 2024 – Mar 2025). Their net bookings for Fiscal 2023 (ended this March) were of $5.28 billion, much more comparable to their forecast for Fiscal 2024.

Now, that is a major increase of $2.7 billion in just one fiscal year, something that hasn’t been happening even with the ongoing success of GTA Online. Take-Two currently has Judas in the pipeline from the makers of Bioshock, alongside potentially a new Mafia game, but neither of those two games can pump up the numbers that much – they may sell well and may be anticipated IP, but we’re talking a difference of multiple billions in net revenue here.

I’m sure by now you can draw the parallels. This looks incredibly similar to what happened in 2011. Not even releases like Red Dead Redemption drove revenue up as much as, for example, GTA IV did, and GTA V was expected to. Now Take-Two, for the first time in a long time, are expecting a major increase in their net revenue for Fiscal 2025, something that historically only Rockstar releases have done. This is most likely, almost without a doubt, Grand Theft Auto VI.

They expect to sustain the big Fiscal 2025 forecasts all the way to Fiscal 2026, which would imply one of those “groundbreaking titles that (…) will set new standards of quality and success” is expected to continue to sell like hotcakes. Again, most likely GTA VI and/or it’s online component.

Let’s look at the wording as well, this is the same kind of wording Take-Two used to describe Rockstar’s next GTA game, which can be seen in this PCGamer article, which I’ll quote below.

“With development of the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series well underway, the Rockstar Games team is determined to once again set creative benchmarks for the series, our industry, and for all entertainment, just as the label has done with every one of their frontline releases,” said Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick during [September 2022’s] financial update.”

Investors know this just as well, and have noticed it, as Take-Two’s stock skyrocketed after-hours.

Remarks on Delays

Now, of course you might be saying “pfft, it’ll probably be delayed”. Maybe, of course. These are just forecasts, but they are a bigger piece of bread in a world of breadcrumbs – after all, GTA V was delayed too, and the big numbers did mean it was coming.
Many high-profile games have gotten delayed recently, Rockstar does delay most of their game releases, but we don’t know if they’re not going to attempt to go for a different strategy here – announcing when the game is further into development, avoiding delays as much as possible, so on and so forth, in a much different gaming industry landscape than the one in 2012/2013.

We’ll have to wait, but I think there is a lot of fodder here to say… we might be closer than we think to the big announcement if Fiscal 2025 truly is their target, and if it’s potentially coming out in, say… Autumn 2024. Rockstar likes marketing their games, and if this one is as big as it seems to be… they’ll want to talk about it quite a lot, maybe sooner rather than later!

If you’ve skipped to here because you find this too chonky, find a tl;dr by our GTAForums moderator Jason, included in our hype-filled GTA VI speculation thread.

The post Take-Two expecting large Net Bookings increase for Fiscal 2025 appeared first on GTANet.com.

If there’s one thing that the R* community likes to do is speculate, so obviously what dropped today and the details within those social media posts had part of the community feeling like they were going on one of Dax’s trips at least for a bit.

If you haven’t paid attention, let’s break it down, just like Mutt would break down chemicals for your next LSD trip.

Table of Contents

• The Original Tweet
• The Rabbit
• The Follow-Up Tweet
• Fort Myers Gets Rabbit’d IRL
• Closing Remarks

The Original Tweet

At 5 PM GMT, midday EST, Rockstar posted a tweet that showed psychedelic effects based on the new GTA Online update, but seemingly without any rhyme or reason – they just posted those, alongside a Rockstar logo (two even), in a perfectly looping fashion.

To most this is a completely innocent update advertisement tweet, but when the first frame of the tweet (and YouTube video!) is a neon-coloured Rockstar logo, and the tweet doesn’t actually include any direct references to the recently-released GTA Online update (a hashtag, a logo, a name…), other than the YouTube video’s title – this is bound to send parts of the community into a frenzy, especially those who have notifications enabled…

As soon as it was posted, folks on GTAForums and even Twitter/Reddit started dissecting the video, because sure, it was most certainly related to the latest GTA Online content update, but there seemed to be something more to it. For instance, there are exactly six heart beats in the video alongside the psychedelic sounding audio, that only lasted until the middle of the video, where a Rockstar logo blended into the rabbit hole (what the rainbow tunnel is named within the game’s new missions).

You know what the number six means to a lot of the Rockstar community – and that is the next Grand Theft Auto game. For the next hour or so, the community was left wondering just exactly what was going on with Rockstar teasing an update that already had had a teaser and a trailer, why they were making us go through the update’s rabbit hole again, and why the audio sounded so mysterious yet revealing at the same time.

Many have speculated that the Drug Wars Dose missions could give us some sort of reference to the next GTA game (which in my opinion would be a pretty genius thing to do, catch everyone by surprise with a reference to the next game during an acid trip or something similar – after all, all the community’s speculation can sometimes feel like a trip!), so Rockstar posting a video like this certainly didn’t help the rumour mill’s speed!

Some members of GTAForums even went to the effort of looking at the audio spectrogram to look for clues in the distorted audio, and even manipulating the audio in case it was an ARG (alternate reality game), but to no success, so I won’t be posting that specific speculation here, as funny as it was to observe!

The Rabbit

Before we move on to the next tweet that Rockstar made an hour later, let’s go back in time a few days. Since the first post about the new GTA Online content update, Rockstar have been signing off all of their posts and even emails with a little rabbit at the end. This ended up being a reference to one of the First Dose missions, and an obvious reference to being on acid, chasing the proverbial white rabbit whilst on a drug trip, and so on (e.g. Alice in Wonderland); but at the same time, some hawk-eyed community members spotted something – the rabbit is white and has reddish eyes, kind of albino… just like a Florida White Rabbit. I ended up making a small, low-effort graphic for an easier comparison.

So before the following section, people didn’t have much to go on, it’s just a rabbit, commonly associated with psychedelic trips, a reference to Alice in Wonderland (following the white rabbit – the original meaning, not the bad one from the people associated with the first letter at the top of most keyboards), no one had really thought of the Florida White Rabbit, until the follow-up tweet…

The Follow-Up Tweet

Now that the rabbit is out of the way, let’s get into what happened an hour later. While the community was already confused and hyped at what the hell was going on, wildly speculating about that short, few-second clip that R* posted and why it happened (other than advertising the update), they posted another one, but this time, simply promoting some GIF additions to Giphy, to celebrate the release of Los Santos Drug Wars.

Oh no, some people said, this is just something to advertise some GIF’s, right? Well, it just so happens that the community instantly noticed that that one 15 second video wasn’t part of the GIF collection, and the GIF they used as an example had something very particular to it…

Not only it was the the same rabbit from the marketing, it was a GIF of the rabbit’s shape getting chromatically aberrated (the dual colour distortion you see) into pink and blue.

Six heartbeats, pink and blue, and something else in the mix that I’ll cover in the next section, led to the rumour mill spinning out of control on the forums, and even social-media wide, with the original video at the time of writing having more than 3.5 MILLION views on Twitter along with 129K likes, and the YouTube video having 91K views.

At this point, I was seeing comments all over the forums and social media talking about how R* had to be doing it on purpose, how the colours could not be random, plus the whole thing with the mysterious 15-second video and the six heartbeats… and – you know what, I thought, this is most certainly one of the least bonkers things that the R* community has come up with in terms of a potential GTA VI teaser, whether it’s meaningful or not (i.e. whether R* are actually meaning to tease anything or just messing with the community alongside the theme of psychedelic drugs, knowing they’d notice the details).

Some, including myself, have brought up the idea of R* doing an ARG, much like Valve did to advertise Portal 2 (extremely recommended read on the Portal Wiki!), although I personally think it would take a lot more effort to get the entire community together to decipher such complex things.

Eventually, droxcy on the forums came up with something (half as a joke, don’t take the “has to be about GTA6” too literally) that a lot of us had forgotten after being originally posted last Saturday by someone else on the forums…

Fort Myers, Florida Gets Rabbit’d IRL

First of all, a disclaimer: everything from here is just community wild speculation to add context to the reactions to today’s social posts, and because of its timing, it is not necessarily at all anything Rockstar-related. There are many street artists who do stuff like this as a prank, message spreading, or otherwise.

Reported on December 6th, Fort Myers, a city in Florida got “invaded” by a “horde” of mysterious rabbit signs (alternate link for EU users) put up on poles, alongside the regular Christmas decorations. American Venom brought this to the forums’ attention last Saturday, even including a cheeky icon representing the aforementioned LS Drug Wars rabbit. I even half-jokingly said myself “lol imagine if [it] was an actual R* ARG, hundreds of rabbit signs popping up around Florida cities at the same time the GTA Online update drops“.

ABC7 Southwest Florida even posted a video about it last week, speaking to residents, business owners, and showing the bunnies up on the poles. “Christmas is in the air… but so is something else” said one of the reporters – “a metal mystery on First St. and Hendry St., Monroe St., Jackson St., Second St. and just about every other in-between.”, meaning the rabbits were just about everywhere in the downtown area.

In the video, citizens of Fort Myers say they haven’t seen anything of the sort, other than the usual Christmas decorations that are put up at this time of year. More interestingly, after the reporter “fell down the rabbit hole” one citizen who lives downtown alleges they saw the person who put up the rabbit signs, on stilts: “It was the day after Thanksgiving, probably around 10/11 o’clock at night, he was on painter’s stilts“.

According to the video posted about 9 days ago, no one knew who was responsible and the police were investigating, but the city admitted to not being in any sort of urgency to take them down as they were otherwise harmless signs.

Closing Remarks

Obviously the happenings of today brought people back to this situation that happened a couple of weeks ago, because the timing is so close, and dots started being connected, but obviously, as the disclaimer at the top says, this is more in the territory of community speculation just to add context to today’s community craze, more than reporting on factual happenings like the Rockstar tweets including specific details.

Things like these aren’t unheard of for marketing campaigns, so obviously the more conspiratorial and curious have already been thinking on the forums if this could be traced to something, either on Google Maps or IRL… but obviously not everyone is on board with something like this, and at the end of the day, the videos, GIFs and the rabbit are referencing the recently released GTA Online update – the question in the community just is… what if there’s more? The hype train for the next GTA entry is an extraordinarily fast, out of control one, so anything goes when things like these happen, even if they’re meaningless.

And that is exactly what brought the community into ecstasy (or LSD?) today. Meaningful or not, things like this are certainly more fun to report and speculate on than weird fake “leaks” and fake information on shady websites, reddit, or even over on our own forums. Whether it was intentional or not, it’s brought Rockstar big numbers on social media, and the part of the community that is excited for the next game has gotten all perked up again, so we shall see if this is all a big acid trip leading us to a truth, or absolutely nothing.

Join us over in our GTAForums GTA VI section to speculate on all the latest happenings and events.
Join us on Twitter as well.

The post Chasing the White Rabbit: GTA VI Community Goes Down the Speculation Rabbit Hole appeared first on GTANet.com.