GTA V just got made playable on desktop and mobile browsers.
On Tuesday morning, fans began posting on social media that they were playing the full GTA V Story Mode within internet browsers such as Google Chrome. The entire game could be played on a range of devices including mobile phones look out the need to have to download, install or stream anything. The URL is simply playgta5.com. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of people had viewed footage of it on Twitter.
On top of running inside of the browser, it supported keyboard & mouse, controller and touchscreen input. It was the PC version of the game meaning you could change things like video resolution and save your game. GTA Online could not be accessed however.
Swift Removal
Of course, letting people play an entire paid video game without owning it, for free, in a browser is a massive copyright infringement. I wouldn’t have expected it to last very long and it was honestly taken down quicker than most people expected. Just hours after this began to spread on social media and as I was writing this article, I saw the website get taken down in real time.
There’s probably another reason why this was taken down so quickly. With the save support, it allowed people to put in the recently leaked in-development version of GTA 6’s map. Footage of this being played in the browser has been circulating online too.
Visiting the website now displays a Cloudflare “blocked” message. A warning states this content has been restricted due to a violation.
It was just last week that an Android port and Switch version was taken down by Take-Two Interactive. Many of our readers consistently ask about GTA V coming to mobile so all this news disappoints them because there still isn’t an official version yet despite it evidently running on Android devices. A web-based version of Vice City was also recently pulled by Rockstar’s parent company.
A New Era
This project seems to be work of someone who used AI to assist them. In the past week, lots of video games have been decompiled by AI tools and merged into other games. Viral social media posts show Minecraft in Grand Theft Auto V & Red Dead redemption 2, Mario in Elden Ring and so on. Whilst the AI is shoddy work, it’s opening a whole new can of worms that video game companies are going to have to deal with. Take-Two don’t take too kindly when the IP is messed with. We are now in uncharted territory.
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