With how disappointing the latest sequels of famous franchises had been during this first half of the 2020s (except resident evil, yay) I expect GTA to fall a bit short as well…
Like, it’s going to be a good game but it won’t blew anyone away. Also probably is going to be the buggiest GTA at launch. That’s the trend in big games now.
They’ve dumped $2billion of that back into developing this game. That’s 4x as much as they spent on RDR2 and about 5x as what they spent on GTAV.
So as far as “I’m not sure they even bothered” goes, well it seems they bothered quit a bit more than they did on those other games which were both epic.