GTA 5’s story DLC was scrapped because GTA Online was a ‘cash cow’, cinematics editor claims

Grand Theft Auto 5’s planned story DLC was cancelled because GTA Online was making so much money, a former developer claims.

Info datamined from the game in 2023 suggested that a DLC pack named Agent Trevor was one of three cancelled expansions for the game, alongside other expansions called Zombie Apocalypse and Alien Invasion.

Joseph Rubino, who was a senior camera artist and virtual cinematographer at Rockstar for six years, has told the SanInPlay YouTube channel that he worked on the Trevor DLC before it was cancelled.

“That was kind of my thing,” Rubino said. “I was one of the main editors, camera artist and doing a lot of the second unit on-stage stuff.

[Then] we split our teams into two, so I stayed on GTA Online and then this DLC, which [Trevor actor] Steven Ogg was a very important part of, and then some of the team overlapped and went to Red Dead Redemption 2 early on”.

Explaining why the DLC was cancelled, Rubino claimed that the initial financial success of GTA Online made Rockstar change its priorities and focus more on that.

“What happened was when GTA Online came out, it was so much of a cash cow and people were loving it so much that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would out-compete that,” he explained.

“I think looking back now I would say that you could probably do both, but that was a business decision that they made.”

Rubino said the decision to cancel the DLC made him “a little upset”, adding: “[That] was a lot of reason for me being a little sour at that time, because I was like ‘yo, what the fuck guys, this shit’s awesome, let’s keep going, let’s finish this shit.”

Rubino said the DLC was around half complete when it was cancelled, but notes: “A lot of that stuff did end up making it, I believe, into later iterations of GTA Online, I think, so it’s not like they wasted it. It was really, really good.”

Rubino’s story is similar to that of Trevor actor Steven Ogg, who discussed the story DLC’s cancellation during an interview held in April.

“Trevor was going to be undercover, he was working with the feds,” Ogg said. “We did shoot some of that stuff with ‘James Bond Trevor’, where he’s still kind of a fuck-up, but he’s doing his best.

“Then it just disappeared and they never did it, they never followed up on it.”