Rockstar Games released its most successful and most recent Grand Theft Auto 10 years ago yesterday, capping off a decade of unparalleled success.

Why it matters: Among the game's legacies, GTA V has transformed how Rockstar — one of the top studios in the world — makes games and has changed how much of the world watches what other people play.

• The game has sold more than 185 million copies to date, according to publisher Take-Two Interactive, and is a best-seller across an unprecedented three consecutive console generations.
• By one measure, that makes it the second best-selling game of all time, ahead of Tetris but behind Minecraft.

Be smart: GTA V was originally released Sept. 17, 2013, for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, swiftly cresting $1 billion in revenue in its first three days of release, according to Take-Two.

• GTA V is an interactive drama set in San Andreas, a satirized version of Los Angeles. It's a time capsule of a game developed in the late 2000s and early 2010s, evoking early Obama-era headlines on TMZ, the burst housing bubble and the debate on whether torture works.
• While other GTA games let players control a single criminal, V allowed them to switch among three — former bank robber Michael De Santa, young criminal Franklin Clinton and quick-tempered eccentric Trevor Philips.
• As GTAs go, V supported open-ended play that could quickly devolve into cops-and-robbers mayhem in a world rendered so meticulously by Rockstar's army of developers that even the way characters' flip-flops realistically separated from the heel of each foot proved noteworthy. The game was critically acclaimed as an immersive, entertaining criminal playground, though criticized for its negative portrayal of women.

State of play: The success of GTA V inspired Rockstar to abandon its approach of cascading sequels and spinoffs. The shift proved to be extremely lucrative for the company.

• Through GTA V's multiplayer side mode, GTA Online, it treated the game not as a conventional Rockstar release that would be set down after a few years by players and developers but as a perpetually updatable game world.
• That economic model worked, and Take-Two soon began regularly bragging about hundreds of millions of dollars of microtransactions earned through its games, much of them generated through GTA Online.

Rockstar has transformed as a studio since GTA V's release, reckoning with reports of development crunch burning out developers (which it has vowed to learn from), seeing the exit of multiple senior producers and designers, and showing signs of some changing values with the deletion of transphobic content from a re-release of the original GTA V.

GTA's most surprising impact might be its transformation into must-see virtual theater. A decade after release, it's the most popular game for players to watch on Amazon-owned Twitch.

The intrigue: Over the years, player exploits in GTA V's playground became a reporting beat unto itself.

• There was a yearslong search for an in-game bigfoot, a debate over the propriety of rich players being able to nuke poorer ones, a cascade of updates pushing in-game crime into the game's virtual suburbs, and endless efforts to stop GTA V's seemingly unstoppable train.

What's next: Take-Two has hinted to investors that the next GTA won't be released until mid-2024 or early 2025, at the soonest.

Microsoft executives expected in spring 2022 to launch the next Xbox console in 2028, and were considering a more flexible approach to its gaming hardware, according to an internal chat log released as part of the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit to block Microsoft's purchase of Activision.

Driving the news: The 2028 launch plan was referenced in a May 2022 meeting among more than a dozen senior Microsoft executives attended by CEO Satya Nadella, CFO Amy Hood and head of gaming Phil Spencer, among others, according to the document.

• In a brief chat exchange, a non-Xbox executive asked the gaming leadership team whether the next Xbox will veer from the traditional model of consoles having fixed hardware standards that all game makers develop for.

What they're saying: "One of the things consoles have been really great at is giving a very clear platform target for developers, and [Game Development Kit] has been really good at this," Anuj Gosalia, corporate vice president of immersive experiences, wrote in the chat at one point.

• "Is the plan for 2028 to keep that [illegible] like model or force a Windows like flexible/capabilities like model?"
• "We have already started this journey with Xbox One and Xbox One X, furthering it in Series S | X," Kevin Gammill, corporate vice president of gaming ecosystems, replies, referring to Microsoft's experimentation with different-powered Xbox models in recent console generations.
• "We need to be even more flexible going forward with gen 10, but also provide the ability for creators to take advantage of unique hardware capabilities."

Between the lines: The 2028 target, stated casually in a chat that the participants probably did not expect to ever be public, is consistent with more recent, vaguer statements from Microsoft lawyers about expectations that the industry's next console generation will commence that year.

Groups of indie developers, labor unions and venture capitalists are all arguing that Microsoft should be permitted to buy Activision Blizzard, according to amicus briefs filed as part of the FTC's lawsuit against Microsoft.

Why it matters: The briefs are part of an unusually diverse set of voices supporting the $69-billion mega-deal.

• They were filed to the 9th Circuit of Appeals in California last week as part of the FTC's appeal of a lower court's refusal to issue a preliminary injunction against the purchase.

What they're saying: The brief from the indie studios includes Curve Games (Human Fall Flat), Finji (Tunic), iam8bit (Escape Academy) and Strange Scaffold (Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator).

• They argue that Microsoft's acquisition of Activision would lead to Call of Duty games being added to Game Pass, which would help the subscription service and therefore help indies in a competitive market:
• "The more subscribers to Game Pass there are, the more opportunities for those subscribers to try indie games that they otherwise might not have played. And the more those indie games are played on Game Pass, the more likely they are to be played elsewhere too."
• The brief reveals that Escape Academy has drawn 1.5 million players via Game Pass, and Human Fall Flat some 14.2 million through Microsoft's subscription service.

Between the lines: In another brief, six venture capital firms argue that the FTC is asking the court to lower the standard for preliminary injunctions in a way that'd "be destructive to the innovation ecosystem that plays such a critical role in the U.S."

• A brief from the AFL-CIO urges approval of the deal due to the labor neutrality pact signed by Microsoft and the Communication Workers of America in reaction to the planned bid. The unions describe it as a "blueprint for labor relations in the industry."

🤔 Unity apologized yesterday "for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused." In a company meeting today, executives floated capping the fees at 4% of revenue for games making over $1 million and dropped plans for them to be retroactive, Bloomberg reports.

🇫🇷 "C'est cette violence que je condamne, pas les jeux vidéo," ("It is the violence that I condemn, not video games") French president Emmanuel Macron said in a lengthy statement on Twitter/X this weekend, expressing support for the gaming industry and its culture. In June, he had pinned some of the blame for nationwide riots on gamers, Sky News reports.

👀 Former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar says he is joining Roblox's board of directors.

🔥 Nexus Mods, the popular repository for game mods, says it has blocked mods that remove players' ability to choose their pronouns in Starfield. "We stand for diversity and inclusion in our community and the removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community," Nexus Mods reps told 404 Media.

☹️ Ascendant Studios, indie makers of Call-of-Duty-with-magic Immortals of Aveum is laying off 45% of its workforce, the company said late last week after Polygon broke the news. There had been signs that the August-released, EA-published game had sold poorly.

😲 Nintendo briefed Activision on its successor to the Switch last December, leaving the Call of Duty maker to expect a device comparable in power to Gen 8 consoles (PS4, Xbox One), The Verge reports, citing a newly released document in the FTC vs. Microsoft case.

• The current Switch is comparable to a Gen 7 console, trading off power for portability and selling quite well as a result.

That May 2022 chat among Microsoft executives in which 2028 plans for the next Xbox were discussed ended with a request to the company's gaming leaders that'll sound familiar to people in many fields of work these days: What could you do with AI?

• The identity of the speaker was redacted from the released transcript, but it's the kind of grand request that might come from a CEO or CFO, both of whom attended the meeting.

The question: "One of the framing things I'd encourage you all to think about is what's the highest ambition thing you could [do] with AI? It's great and necessary to be using ML (machine learning) everywhere you described. But we're seeing such disruptive leaps with the highest ambition AI that it's worth pondering what we could [do] with gaming.

• "You can only attempt a handful of these things at a time across the breadth of the company, because the folks you need to go pull it off are scarce and busy. And the investments you have to make in infrastructure are pretty big. But when the stuff plays out, it's like you've discovered something magical."

Be smart: Microsoft hasn't officially announced any plans for generative AI and gaming, but the company more broadly added AI-assisted copilots to nearly all its major products from Windows to Office to Bing.