GTA V playable in browser immediately nuked

An unofficial GTA V port on a web browser went live and was taken down within hours. Alex St. Louis, the founder of Wonder Interactive, shared a clip of the in-browser gameplay on X, which he said was ported to WebAssembly using AI. It’s unclear what made the website become inaccessible in such short notice — people who tried to access the page received Cloudflare Error 1014 for some time, before the PlayGTA5.com page was replaced by a food ad from the ‘70s — but Take-Two would likely have raised copyright concerns if it saw the project. The game can still be accessed via online archives.

While Take-Two does not have the same reputation as Nintendo when it comes to litigation, it’s still quite protective of its intellectual property. It has previously shut down a similar browser port of GTA: Vice City and has even sent the creator of the GTA V Homebrew port on the Nintendo Switch a cease-and-desist letter. While Rockstar allows anyone to create mods for its games, it has strict guidelines on what they could and couldn’t do with these mods, with the guiding principle of “Respect Our Games.” While these ports show how far modern browsers and computing hardware have come, IP like GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 generally can’t be used to showcase these capabilities, even if the creators of the port don’t charge users, add a caveat, or even require players to own a copy of the game.

What’s quite interesting, though, is how AI may have helped accelerate its development, with St. Louis suggesting that the developer/s used the technology to build the GTA V port. It took Rockstar about five years to make the original GTA V, with development beginning in 2008. And even after it launched in 2013, Rockstar still took over a year and a half to launch the title on PCs. Although it’s unclear who made this short-lived GTA V port or how many were involved in the project, it seems that it was backed by a significantly smaller team compared to other AAA game studios.

Some gamers also asked this question: what’s the difference between game streaming and porting a game to a browser, and why don’t game developers and publishers use the latter instead? Game streaming services like GeForce Now run games server-side and then stream the video and audio output to users, while browser ports download or load the game assets into your browser while processing almost everything on the host device. While this removes most of the drawbacks of streaming, like latency or input lag and video compression artifacts, it also introduces a new host of challenges like performance issues, memory limitations, and compatibility constraints. So, for major commercial releases with huge budgets, it makes more sense to run games natively instead of relying on browsers that could break the game with just one bad update.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.