Valve, the creators of Steam, have just blocked everyone’s ability to see new GTA Online updates before Rockstar Games announces them including DLC drops. For many years now, a website ran by enthusiasts, SteamDB, has allowed us to view new game patches being prepared for release.
This excites players of various games including Rockstar Games titles from GTA V to Red Dead Redemption 2. If Rockstar were testing and preparing a new GTA Online update for release, we’d know days before it came out. Most recently we saw Rockstar begin testing a new update for Bully: Scholarship Edition this way and it gained some traction.
In an unpopular move, the Seattle-based video game platform and developer began privating unreleased builds of games back in November so they no longer show up in the Steam database. This stops fans knowing when a new patch is being worked on for their favourite games.
Valve have not come out and said why they have done this many years after allowing it to happen. Many people assume it is to protect developers from the community creating news stories out of changes in the database. When a new update is released, it will still show up in the game page on SteamDB though.
It Is Over
Since November, Valve have rapidly rolled out the privatisation of game branches across games and publishers. Some Rockstar Games titles were impacted in the past few weeks. However, GTA V was just hit by the change. This means after almost 10 years our way of learning more about Rockstar’s plans for GTA Online is gone. GTA 6 will likely be the first Rockstar Games title to never have this ability when it eventually comes to PC after the game’s console launch.
Agents of Sabotage will have been the last DLC that we could learn more about ahead of time. Also, before the builds went private, there was a patch in-development for GTA V but that could have been related to this week’s update for current gen consoles.
SteamDB Can Live On
That said, SteamDB is still an incredible tool for many reasons. It has great chart and price tracking which is worth using. Also, SteamDB shared that Source SDK Base 2007 reached 220,000 concurrent users on Steam for the first time earlier this month. Many people might wonder how this is relevant to GTA V. It is used by FiveM to introduce Steam integration by spoofing itself as a Source Engine mod.
Are you sad about this change made by Valve? Let us know down in the comments. To keep up to date with every GTA Online news update, make sure to check back to RockstarINTEL and sign up to our newsletter for a weekly round-up of all things Rockstar Games.
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