Opinion: I'm 40 pumpkins deep in GTA Online and GTA 6 is coming for my girlfriend, Los Santos

Heads up: the facts below are real and sourced. The opinions, and the deeply unflattering account of how I spend my evenings, are mine. Rockstar has not asked me to say any of it, and after this they may ask me to stop.

It is late October 2026. GTA 6 is under four weeks away. And I am standing on a pier in Los Santos, in a pumpkin mask, waiting for a ghost to turn up so I can photograph it for double money.

I am a grown adult. I want that on the record.

This is the story of how I got here, what I'm doing about it, and the question you actually clicked for: when GTA 6 lands on November 19, do I dump Los Santos, or do I keep seeing it on the side?

What I'm actually doing in GTA Online

Three things, in descending order of dignity.

Hunting ghosts. There is a Halloween event running until November 4. Ghosts Exposed pays double, finishing all five weekly challenges pays a GTA$2,000,000 bonus, and there are 200 pumpkins scattered across the map. I have found about forty. That is one pumpkin in five, which in any other job is a performance review. The map is enormous, my sense of direction is a rumour, and I have now walked past the same lighthouse so often it has started to look at me.

Hoarding money I have no plan for. I have more GTA$ than a person with no plans should. I own a garage of cars I never drive, because the one I drive is always the one I crashed into the one I wanted to drive. GTA Online's economy is a masterclass in converting real patience into imaginary wealth, and I would like a refund on the patience.

Saying goodbye, slowly and embarrassingly. Nobody has announced that GTA Online is ending, because it is not. I am doing the farewell tour anyway. I drove the coast road at dusk. I visited the airfield. I climbed the tallest thing I could find and stared at the skyline like a man in a perfume advert. The city did not notice. The city has never noticed. That is the nature of the relationship.

Now the small print: will GTA Online survive GTA 6?

Here is what is on the record. I'm keeping it apart from what I think, mostly because I think a lot.

What has been said. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in February that he has "every reason to believe" the company will keep supporting GTA Online. At the September shareholder meeting, Take-Two said Rockstar will keep supporting it after GTA 6 and beyond. GTA 6 itself is single-player at launch, and Rockstar has announced no online mode.

What has not been said. How often it gets updates. Whether they are real content or a seasonal event with a new hat. Whether a successor exists. Reporting says no new GTA Online is being discussed. "We will support it" is a sentence with the elasticity of a hostage negotiator's promise. It can mean a lot of things, and most of them are cheaper than you hoped.

The numbers are impressive and useless. GTA V has sold more than 230 million copies, and new accounts were reported up around 50 percent after the second GTA 6 trailer. Marvellous. It tells me the game is a monster. It does not tell me how many of those people will still log in on a wet Tuesday in December with a brand new Vice City sitting on their console, looking hot. Rockstar does not publish active players, so anyone quoting you an exact figure is guessing in a nice shirt.

My read

This is a guess, and it is my guess. GTA Online does not die. It gets demoted. It becomes the second thing you play: the comfort-food game you open on a quiet night, or when your mates haven't finished the GTA 6 story, or when you want to drive something stupid off a very tall building and a plot would just get in the way.

Rockstar keeps it running because it is cheaper and kinder to keep a hundred million accounts happy than to switch them off. But it will not get the love it got in its prime. Rockstar is a studio of finite size, and for the next year the most expensive game it has ever made will be sitting in the middle of the table eating everyone's dinner.

And one cynical footnote. A game that old, with a store that old, does not keep getting events because Rockstar is sentimental. It keeps getting events because it still pays the bills. Love is lovely. Revenue is a reason.

So do I stay faithful?

No. Let's not insult each other.

For roughly the first month after November 19, I will not be in Los Santos. I will be in Vice City, being bad at it, in public. That is not a prediction. It is a schedule. I have blocked it out, and I have told the lighthouse.

After that, I think I drift back. Not for the grind, and not for the next car I don't need. For the thing GTA Online does that nothing else quite does: a place full of strangers doing pointless, ridiculous, mildly criminal things together. If GTA 6 doesn't offer that at launch, and today it doesn't, there is a gap in the market, and I suspect I won't be the only one standing in it with a pumpkin mask on.

If Rockstar ever builds a successor, I will be first in the queue and last to stop complaining. Until then, Los Santos stays installed. Some relationships are not about the new thing.

The verdict

GTA Online outlives GTA 6's launch week. It will probably outlive my interest in the pumpkins. Whether it stays a living city or becomes a very well-kept museum with a gift shop is the actual question, and nobody outside Rockstar can answer it yet. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling a thumbnail.

Tonight's plan: finish the ghosts, find the other hundred and sixty pumpkins, and say my slow goodbye to the lighthouse. Then Vice City. Then shame.

If you want the speculative version of all this, I wrote one earlier: our hypothetical on the future of GTA Online after GTA 6 covers the scenarios. For the November dates, Six's launch-week calendar has the week day by day, and my what if GTA 6 is just fine piece is still here for anyone who wants to be more worried.