After the release of the new GTA 5 trailer, we became conspicuously aware, once again, of the absent PC release date for Rockstar’s next open world fiasco. So we reached our hands into the mists of Grand Theft Autos past, crunched some numbers, and came up with the best possible estimate of when the game will be announced and released for the PC.
If we look at all games in the Grand Theft Auto series since Vice City, we can see that it’s about 462 days, on average, between the announcement of the game and the announcement (not release) of the PC version. It’s a slightly more reasonable 212 days between the first console release and the PC release. You can see a game-by-game breakdown in this handy chart:
If we take the average time between console and PC announcement and add it to GTA 5′s original announcement date of October 13, 2011, that should have put the PC release date announcement around January 17, 2013. No such luck. Assuming they’re going to make us wait just as stupidly long as they did for GTA 4 (821 days from the first E3 tease, for the record), we’ll be hearing about a PC release date around January 11, 2014. Every main series entry since Vice City has failed to announce a PC ship date until after the first console version shipped.
In terms of when we might actually be able to play it, the gap between console and PC release has been consistent(ly frustrating) at around 212 days, without the kind of crazy deviation we see in the release date announcement window. 212 days after the currently listed ship date for GTA 5 on the consoles would be April 17, 2014. If the gap is as long as it was for San Andreas, we would have it by April 30 instead.
On the off chance that Rockstar makes us wait as long for a PC announcement as they did on GTA 4, and as long between PC announcement and PC release as they did on San Andreas, we’ve been shoved back to July 4, 2014. Not to say that they couldn’t try to annoy us further by breaking their own records, but that’s our official prediction for the most distant date to reasonably expect the game on PC.
There you have it: by our highly scientific reckoning, you’ll probably be loading up GTA 5 just in time for the 238th anniversary of America’s independence. As to when we may be free from the tyranny of waiting months for our Grand Theft Auto ports (we still haven’t forgotten about Red Dead Redemption, by the way), we don’t have enough data to speculate. At least we always get the best version. We’re willing to wait for the ability to mod in stuff like this.
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