In the span of about 20 seconds and with just a single Discord ping, Rockstar Games got 65,000+ people, nearly all of whom are waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6‘s launch, very excited and then crushed their hopes, dreams, and happiness.
On September 19, at precisely 3:20 p.m. EST, Rockstar Games posted a single message in the GTA Online section of the company’s official Discord server. The message was simply Rockstar Games acknowledging a bug involving a GTA Online weekly challenge that was supposed to unlock a piece of in-game clothing for those who completed it, but wasn’t working properly. Pretty basic GTA Online update. But for some reason, Rockstar Games followed that message up with an “@here.” They did this in a server with 68,097 members. Uh oh!
For those who don’t use Discord, dropping “@here” pings everyone in the server channel unless they specifically opt out of notifications. And most people don’t do that, especially not in Rockstar’s Discord server, where desperate fans cling to the hope that at any time, the studio could drop a new trailer for GTA 6. Rockstar Games has also not really done this before. So that random “@here” instantly caused around 68,000 fans to freak the fuck out. Making matters worse is that for many, myself included, the notification simply appeared as “Rockstar Games – @here” with no further context.
I’ll fully admit that when I first saw it, I assumed the company was making some big random announcement about GTA 6. Instead, what I found when I opened Discord was a lot of confused, sad, and angry fans who weren’t sure why Rockstar had done this to them all. “Why!” “Whattt?” “Shut up!” “WTF?!” “No GTA 6??” “Stop it!” and “HOLY SHIT WHY” were just some of the hundreds and hundreds of messages that whizzed by my eyes when I opened Discord shortly after the ping.
I’ve reached out to Rockstar Games about the Discord ping and why it decided to do this. But whatever the reason, it won’t change the fact that for a brief and chaotic moment, 65,000+ people went wild thinking they were about to watch a new GTA 6 trailer or get news of another delay. Nope. There’s no new trailer or other big announcement, and GTA 6 is still set to launch in May of next year.
