Rockstar Games have announced today in a Newswire post that GTA Online services, along with stat tracking are shutting down starting 16th December 2021. They also added that this will also apply for some other games on these legacy platforms such as Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire (the original edition, not L.A. Noire VR).
Maintaining online services for such old platforms can be a security and development nightmare in many cases, so this move shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Personally speaking from experience of trying to maintain legacy (in this case Web) systems in the past, it’s much more of a pain than it’s worth, not to mention most GTA Online players are now using the PS4, Xbox One, PC and current-gen platforms to play GTA Online on.
These legacy systems many times cannot be updated to the latest versions of whatever software is used to maintain them, which can pose serious security risks, along with it being a waste of development time when new games are in the horizon and the manufacturers themselves don’t support the consoles anymore.
In the same post, Rockstar has reaffirmed their Fall target release date for GTA V Expanded & Enhanced, for which we hope to have news about very very soon 😉