The giant invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a competitor to GTA. It ended in 'Wasted'
As the gaming world eagerly awaits the November 19 release of Grand Theft Auto VI, the story of the Chinese studio Lightspeed serves as a cautionary tale. Their ambitious attempt to create a GTA competitor, Last Sentinel, has officially collapsed after years of development.
As of this moment, the game Grand Theft Auto VI, or GTA 6 for short, is expected to be released on November 19. The entire gaming industry has already changed its plans in its honor, with people agreeing to pay $100 in advance for a digital copy, and many announcing they will be unavailable for work or family during that month. But while we count the minutes until we return to Vice City, we can spend a few moments with the story of the Chinese attempt to create a competitor to GTA, which reached a total crash last month.
When the people behind GTA try to make GTA again
You might not know the game studio Lightspeed, but you know its parent company, Tencent, very well. It is a massive entity that developed Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile, and Apex Legends Mobile, and owns Supercell and Riot Games. The head of the Lightspeed studio is Steve Martin, a former senior executive at Rockstar Games, the developer of GTA and Red Dead Redemption. Martin recruited many staff members who worked on these games, offering salaries higher than is customary in the industry.
Several years ago, Lightspeed announced a new game called Last Sentinel. It is an open-world game set in a cyberpunk version of Japan, with a deep story and a huge city full of activities. Unlike Rockstar Games, which developed GTA 6 with teams of thousands, Lightspeed tried to advance the project with only hundreds of employees, while high salary costs became a significant burden on production. According to a Bloomberg report, the project stalled repeatedly over the years, partly due to Martin's management style, and total expenses reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
Beautiful trailer, but where is the gameplay?
The first trailer for the game was revealed at The Game Awards in 2023. However, like many other games, it lacked gameplay—a demonstration of what the game looks like in practice, rather than pre-rendered scenes with advanced graphics. More than two years after the first reveal, there was still no gameplay video in sight.
Last year, Lightspeed hyped the launch of Last Sentinel with a video featuring employees expressing their excitement. Even Troy Baker, one of the most famous voice actors in the gaming world, participated in the development and claimed: "This game takes everything you expect from an action-adventure game story, and says: 'No, this is going to be different'."
China calling
At the beginning of the year, the studio held a series of tests with focus groups, and according to Bloomberg, almost all reactions were negative. After presenting the game to the bosses at Tencent in China, the studio was given an ultimatum: fix this mess by July. Despite bringing in an expert from Tencent and spending 3 months trying to improve the game, it remained light-years away from the level of Rockstar games, which is exactly what Tencent demanded.
On July 28, Martin informed the team in the US that Tencent had decided to stop the project, citing concerns that the game was problematic in the current market. Consequently, 80 employees were fired, and the studio announced it would "change the direction of development" to "match the players' expectations." Last Sentinel was in development for more than 6 years, was delayed several times, and eventually exceeded a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. Even if it ever sees the light of day, it will no longer be the Chinese GTA.
